ffwd - vanilla eclairs

This week's recipe is for a treat that you'd normally pick up at a fancy French bakery. But as you read through the recipes, you find that it's really a combination of a couple of fairly easy components - a baton-shaped cream puff and vanilla pastry cream. These are combined and topped with a simple glaze. Though Dorie offered a few suggested variations, I decided to stick with vanilla. 



for the first part of the recipe - the puffs, I assembled my ingredients



the liquids and butter are brought to a boil in a saucepan



flour is added all at once, and then combined until it holds together
you can see the film on the bottom of the pan - that's when you know you're ready
to move on to the next step



in my years of making these, until I found Dorie,
I'd always mixed in the eggs by hand
luckily, she has great ideas, and I'll never go back to using
anything other than a stand mixer
it makes for the perfect shiny dough once the eggs are incorporated



since these puffs needed to be shaped, I decided to use
my favorite trick - a ziplock bag - to form them
I'll get to throw away that whole mess once I'm done

I formed about half of the dough for the eclairs

but since I didn't need them all, I formed the remainder into
mini cream puffs and also circles
the next recipe in AMFT is for Paris-Brest
a treat created to celebrate a bike race!
it sounds wonderful, and on another day, I'd like to try them
so I wanted to form some to put into the freezer to bake later
see my bag at the bottom? empty and ready to throw away!



once the puffs were piped out, I used my finger, dipped in water, to
flatten out the points so that they will bake into nicely-shaped rounds 



the baked puffs
I should have let them sit in the turned-off oven for a bit
they eventually fell a bit and flattened



on to the pastry cream!



this was my first little challenge - my yolks and cornstarch mixture was pretty clumpy



after whisking and whisking with the milk, it was still a mess
so I used my trusty hand-blender and smoothed it all out!
(I wish I'd just used a bit of the cold milk with the yolks and cornstarch
to get a smooth paste, and then added the simmering milk)



next semi-disaster? as the mixture heated up, it got lumpy again!
but with a little vigorous whisking, it came back together to the smooth
creaminess I was looking for



in goes the vanilla



and then the butter
once this is complete, it goes to the refrigerator to get chilled

my cream puffs, ready to serve
the icing came off a bit on the wrap as they chilled in the refrigerator



and these are the Coconut Friands that I made
using the leftover egg-whites
I've made them plain, but here I added a little bittersweet chocolate to some, and
macadamias to others

I liked these and they were fun to make. But I think I'll leave the eclairs to the pastry shop. I'd probably enjoy variations (still looking forward to the Paris-Brest), but not something that I'm compelled to make again anytime soon.

On the other hand, the coconut friands are definitely a terrific find. I'm looking forward to playing around more with changing them up. And it's super-nice to have a dessert that's super-yummy, tiny, and stays nice for a few days.

I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else came up with. Should be fun!!