Difficulty: Medium
Prep Time: 30 Mins
Cook Time:
30 Mins
Total Time:
1 Hr
Cream puffs (or pâte à choux if you’re feeling particularly french today) are often perceived as a fancy foo foo dish. Don’t get me wrong, I feel very luxurious when I eat them, and serving them to friends and family usually gets a few oohs and ahs. But these little puffs are deceivingly easy to make, and all the better to impress your friends with. The dough itself is buttery and not too sweet, but filled with some home made whipped cream and dusted with powdered sugar takes them to dessert heaven. These were perfect for a warm almost-summer day, but if it’s really hot out you could even swap the whipped cream for some vanilla ice cream.
Ingredients
-
For the Puffs
- For the Cream
Instructions
-
Make the Puffs
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Measure out your flour and set aside. Add butter, milk, water, salt, and sugar into a medium sauce pan. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium high heat. As soon as the mixture reaches a boil, remove it from the heat completely.
- Add in the flour and mix with a wooden spoon until the mixture is one consistent, smooth dough. Bring back to the stove and cook for two minutes on medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove dough to a mixing bowl and let cool for 5 minutes.
- While the dough is cooling, add four eggs to a bowl and lightly beat. After the 5 minutes is up, add in the egg mixture in four additions and beat well with your wooden spoon after each addition. You may need some elbow grease here to make sure it's mixed completely with no egg bits showing in the dough. At this point, your dough should be a slightly sticky paste consistency, but thick enough to hold its shape when scooped into a ball. If it seems a little thick, you can add a bit of the 5th egg, but opt for less than more.
- Grab a baking sheet and shape the cream puffs. You can use many different tools around the kitchen to make this happen: a spoon works just great, a cookie dough scoop / melon baller, or if you have a piping bag laying around you do it! I used the lazy chef's piping bag, a ziplock with the tip cut off. Regardless of what you use, you want your puffs to be about the size of a golf ball, with rounded smooth tops. Leave about an inch in between each cream puff.
- Place your puffs in the oven for 15 minutes, then without opening the oven door, lower the oven temp to 325 for another 15 - 20 minutes. Keep an eye on them as they bake, if they look like they're getting browned before your first 10 minutes is up you can turn down your oven temp early.
- Remove from oven and immediately use a butter knife to make a small slit in the bottom of each puff to let the steam escape, move to a wire rack to cool. Make the Cream
- The key to really good fluffy whipped cream is keeping your tools and ingredients cold! To make the whipped cream, you can use a big ballon whisk (and a good forearm workout), and electric mixer, or a stand mixer. Place anything metal (the whisk, beater attachments, and/or bowl) into the freezer for a few minutes before starting.
- Pour your cream, sugar, and vanilla into the bowl. Save a few tablespoons of cream incase you need to adjust the consistency at the end. Start beating slowly and gradually increase the speed, about 2 -4 minutes. You should see the cream start to get noticeably thicker.
- Keep beating until you see soft peaks form. To test this, remove your whisk from the cream and hold it upright. If the cream clings to the whisk and makes a point / peak and then softens / slightly falls, you've got a soft peak! You can keep going if you want firmer whipped cream, but turn down your speed. If it starts to look like it's curdled, you've over whipped a bit. No worries though, it's an easy fix. Add those tablespoons of unwhipped cream you saved and continue to mix until it's your desired consistency. Assemble the Cream Puffs
- Use a butter knife to slice the cream puffs in half. Add a generous spoonful of whipped cream to the bottom half, and place the top half on the whipped cream like a sandwich. If you're feeling fancy, you can pipe the whipped cream into a swirl. Repeat with each cream puff. Top with a sprinkle of powdered sugar and enjoy!