Beware the Eclair!

Hey everyone! Recently my class and I have been exploring French pastries and decided to give choux pastry a try. My partner and I created a classic éclair filled with a light, creamy pastry cream and dipped it in a rich dark chocolate ganache. There are a lot of skills that could be practiced with this recipe, it may seem intimidating but once you get started it gets easier as you go along! First off, we practiced piping! There were many little tricks we used to help make the process clean and smooth. Never fill the piping bag all the way to top! If you do this, you will end up having dough overflow on the other side. Always make sure you flip the top of the piping bag over so that you can cleanly unravel it and twist it, making it easy to pipe! Finally, when piping, it helps to make lines on the other side of the parchment with a marker to help guide you as you go. The next thing we worked on was tempering. When making the pastry cream, we had to combine the hot liquid with egg yolks. Now if we poured it all in at once, the heat from the cream would cook the eggs instantly and we would have chunks of egg in the cream. But we tempered it, meaning we slowly poured in the hot cream bit by bit into the egg yolk to slowly raise the temperature and incorporate the egg yolks. After the pastry cream cooled, we practiced filling the eclairs! There were a lot of different ways to fill them and we were able to try out a couple in class. It helps to have a piping tip in the piping bag but it’s not necessary. A clean way to fill the éclair is by poking a hole on one side of the éclair puff and stick the piping bag tip in and start filling. You should be able to feel the cream filling the puff and stop when its near full. Another way is by cutting the puff cleanly in half like a sandwich and piping little swirls or any pretty design then gently placing the top half back on to display parts of the cream. Once they were all filled, we worked on our dipping skills and covered the tops with chocolate ganache. We had two methods of covering it with chocolate: first we used a spoon and spread the chocolate on top, second was using a piping bag to pipe a slightly thicker ganache on top, third was just dipping the entire éclair in. The third option was the fasted but the messiest as the éclair could easily drop in the chocolate and get soaked.