Chocolate Eclairs

More baking! This post was inspired by an invitation to a new baking club in Aberdeen. It’s an invitation I sadly couldn’t take up as I’m too caught up in bits and pieces for my wedding but it put the idea into my head to bake something sweet for the weekend.

I think everyone’s got fond memories of chocolate eclairs filled with cream don’t they? The soft choux pastry filled with rich cream that goes everywhere when you bite into it. Topped with delicious chocolate. Yum. I consulted my pastry bible – Michelle Roux’s Pastry and found a couple of recipes for choux pastry and eclairs. I won’t post the full recipes here as they’re straight out of the book. In future I’m just going to post recipes that I feel are my own or I’ve jumbled together from enough sources to make them my own.

Before I started I was worried that these would, like most patisserie items, be obscenely complicated and fiddly to make. The truth is they’re a breeze. The choux pastry came together with minimum fuss and I even managed to make a decent job of piping the dough onto a baking tray. A new skill I’d never tried before. Even reducing the quantities from the book I had more dough than I needed for the handful of eclairs I’d planned to make. It wasn’t wasted though as I decided to pipe out a few choux balls to become profiteroles which would keep in the fridge for a few days as cheeky snacks.

Once the eclairs came out of the oven I left them to cool and whisked up some chantilly cream with a little vanilla. This was spooned into the sides of the eclairs before I stilled the finishing touch of some melted chocolate spread on top. We couldn’t wait for the chocolate to set though and the eclairs were devoured immediately with an afternoon coffee. They were absolutely superb.