I hope you didn’t think for even a second that this was an original recipe… because there is no way. I give huge props to anyone who has made an original choux pastry recipe because this was the most difficult recipe I’ve made by a long shot. Despite the setbacks, I’m so excited to share these beautiful little guys with you today. They were delicious and I like to think that my making them was a tiny bit impressive to anyone who saw my (numerous) posts about them.
Profiteroles, or cream puffs, consist of choux pastry that rises and leaves an opening in the middle of the pastry when cooked. They are then filled with a creamy custard filling and drizzled with a semi-sweet chocolate mixture.
By my best estimate, making these cream puffs took about 10-12 hours over 2 days. It shouldn’t be this way on a typical day for anyone else, but we have an extremely small kitchen with only 1 tiny working space. Additionally, there was 1 issue with the recipe I used which caused a lot of trial and error to fix. I’ll explain that in detail so you don’t have the same problem!
The chocolate mixture and the custard cream were both easy enough to make but took some time. I had a sore wrist for a few days after the extreme amount of hand mixing, but it was worth it! The choux pastry dough was really not very difficult if you use the correct amounts of ingredients, which I’ve explained below.
Here’s my review: I used this recipe from An Edible Mosaic. She does a beautiful job of explaining the instructions for each aspect of the recipe and I really appreciated this. The one problem I noticed is that you should NOT use 5 eggs for the choux pastry. After coming out with extremely wet and sticky dough, I looked up several other recipes and it looks like the recipe should have called for 4 eggs based on the amount of the other ingredients. In fact, I then watched this video to get an idea of what the dough should look like when it is ready. I added flour in by 1/4 cup and kneaded until the consistency looked right. I highly recommend using the aforementioned recipe in conjunction with this video to get the best result for your cream puffs.
I loved how these pastries turned out. We learned a little about the uneven cooking in our oven, which will only help us in the future! Let me know if you give these guys a try. Happy baking!
I’d love to try these, they look wonderful! Eggs can be so tricky because large, extra large..etc. and even from the same carton the sizes vary so much. I had trouble with a few of my grandmother’s recipes years ago until I figured out I was using different sized eggs than she was! And I have never been able to make her sponge cake…Florida humidity kills it…she couldn’t even make it all that well when she visited us. Keep baking, find me some one bowl mixtures that can be made on even less counter space than you have. #sailboatproblems Hugs
Oh wow, I didn’t even think about the kitchen space in your boat!! And I didn’t think about the egg size. That very well may have been the problem! 🙂
I love the pictures and this choux buns look absolutely amazing!
Thank you so much!! I appreciate the kind words 🙂
They not only looked great, they tasted great – glad the timing worked out for us to be able to sample these delicious treats. You are brave for even attempting to make them. Keep up the good work!
Love you!! So glad you got to try them. Thanks 🙂