Eclair au Chocolat (gluten free)

So guys, poser that I am, I tried to make the fondant patissier that most sane people buy in the store when they want to make patisserie.

It’s the thing that makes the white glaze on top of the vanilla éclair, and you flavor it with coffee or chocolate for the other “parfums.” It all looked so easy here.

Greased cookie sheet (a friend told me last night it should have been marble and that’s what went wrong).

250 g sugar (1 1/3 cup)

75 g water (1/3 cup), that you then boil with the sugar

A slotted spoon that you need to continually test the syrup to see if it’s done. If you can blow bubbles through the little holes (like soap bubbles) it’s ready. Alternatively you could use a candy thermometer like a normal person and get it to 112°C (233°F).

But look! Bubbles!

I leapt for joy.

Spread it on the cookie sheet and let it cool for 20 minutes, and then you’re supposed to do some fancy schmancy maneuvering with a putty knife to create this glorious white fluffy confection that you can roll into a ball and take pieces of to melt with water and form a glaze.

But I have too many pictures and instructions for this éclair recipe to go into much detail about what was not a success.

The first or the second time I tried it (sob).

So, moving along to the éclairs (and the makeshift glaze I made up to compensate). I got the recipe and know-how from this book:

Pastry lessons by Christophe Felder, offered to me by my lovely friend Renata who shares my passion for cooking.

I made both the unsuccessful fondant and the cream that you put inside the éclair a day in advance because I didn’t want to get overwhelmed. If you are trying this for the first time and are not in a hurry, it might be a good idea for you to do the same (with the cream – but skip the fondant unless you are a genius, in which case show me how to do it).

The cream is called Crème Patissière and I was annoyed that the book mentioned the butter but didn’t tell you when to incorporate it. Also, the recipe was for vanilla or coffee éclairs so I added my own touch with the chocolate.

50 cl whole milk (2 1/8 cups) that you set to heat in a saucepan over low heat. Make sure it’s whole milk – that’s important.

6 egg yolks

120 g sugar 2/3 cup

50 gr corn starch 1/3 cup

Whisk them together gently (no electric beater)

Then chop up 200 grams of dark chocolate.

Don’t forget about the milk!  eeeeee

Pour the milk slowly over the mix and stir.

The chocolate will melt from the hot milk.

Then put 50 g butter (3.5 Tablespoons) in a saucepan

and add the rest of the ingredients you’ve stirred together.

Whisk them vigorously while over high heat

until it thickens and becomes a pastry cream. Yay!

You need to cover it immediately so it doesn’t touch the air and I put it in a ziploc bag because I thought the plastic was stronger than saran wrap. I folded it over to remove the air as it cooled, and then zipped out all the air when it was ready and put it in the refrigerator overnight.

Now it’s the next day and I’m ready to make the Pâte à Chou (which means dough shaped like cabbages, or what we know as cream puff pastries).

First make sure you take out the pastry cream from the refrigerator to get it to room temperature or it will be too hard to fill the éclairs with. Learn from my mistake because I was working with cold unyielding cream and I burst several holes in the pastry bag while working, sending large spirals of chocolate cream all over the work surface and myself.

Second, preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C ).

Third, cover your baking sheet with wax paper.

Now, the recipe I used only makes enough for 6 large éclairs, and the pastry cream is enough for triple that. So I’m going to give you the double portion of the recipe (but the images will show you only the single portion). And you may want to add another third to the recipe to match the pastry cream amount. Confused yet?

Put 250 g (just over a cup) of water in a saucepan

1/2 cup (110 grams of butter), cut into pieces. Melt that together

along with 1 teaspoon sugar

and 1/2 teaspoon salt

then add 1 1/2 cups (140 g flour). I used a regular gluten free mix, and let me tell you – gluten free really works well with puff pastries. You don’t notice the difference in taste or texture (or perhaps the taste is even better, if I do say so myself).

Continue stirring quickly over the heat until the dough dries out. You can probably figure out when it doesn’t look moist anymore. Maybe a couple of minutes.

Remove the mixture from the heat and add 6 small eggs, one at a time, also while stirring vigorously. It’s your pre-éclair-eating-frenzy workout.

Now put the warm mix into a pastry bag. The directions say an 8 mm tip (does that mean anything to you?).

I clearly did not have the right tip because my éclairs looked like this.

But, you know, when they were done they were not so very bad. Plus they’re filled and covered with various chocolates so you can get away with a lot.  Looky here.

Oh, I almost forgot. Bake in your preheated oven for about 20 minutes til they look nicely browned, like this.

Not perfect, but hey!

Now, here’s where I fudged a last minute chocolate glaze to make up for my disaster of a fondant. I didn’t find anything I was looking for online so I had to make up my own.

For one thing, you can’t use a ganache (just chocolate, cream and butter) because it’s not sweet enough. The pastry cream is not all that sweet, and the puff pastry is not sweet at all. I didn’t want to make a regular frosting because … ew, gross. On an éclair?

But honestly? If your drum has a different beat, dance to it (and then share it). I’m here to learn, not judge.

I melted 100 grams of dark chocolate and mixed it with a cup of heavy cream

and added a cup of confectioner’s sugar.

This was the consistency – see how it’s not at all homogenous? 

So I heated it up in a saucepan until it looked like this.

Just about right (or as good as it gets for now).

Now gird your loins. It’s time to assemble the éclairs.

Cut the éclairs lengthwise, without cutting all the way through.

Stir your pastry cream well, then fill a pastry bag with the (softened) cream and squeeze it into the middle of the éclairs.

Aye, aye – not the effect I was hoping for.

And then drizzle the chocolate glaze over the éclairs.

Emergency! Emergency! There’s a culinary massacre going on here.

You wanted to see my new kitchen? I’ll show you my kitchen. How do I get chocolate stains out of my new tee shirt? Pour boiling water over the stain then wash?

Where are my smelling salts?

But when the kitchen was cleaned and my outfit was changed, and Sir and I sat down to a civilized tea and crumpet (I mean black coffee and éclair), truly all was right in the world.

Because it tasted so (sooooooo) good.

Sir said it tasted better than any éclair he had ever eaten in his whole entire life, and although he might possibly have been trying to butter me up, it was accompanied by too many murmurs of satisfaction to have been completely contrived. (He also said this was worse than any blog post he had ever read in his whole entire life considering there was so very much ado about nothing.  But I’m not ready to hang up my chef’s hat just because of a little discouragement!).

And then, despite the fact that the glaze never hardened (and so the éclairs wouldn’t last longer than a day) I brought the batch to a bridal shower that night.

And there was not one single éclair left over.

 

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