Choux Pastry

When I was home for Christmas a couple of months ago, I was by myself in the house one afternoon, and was very bored. So, as I often do, on a whim I decided I'd finally have a go at making choux pastry for the first time. Having seen it the most amazing choux gateaus on the Great British Bake Off this time, these examples from Brendan and John, I knew that this is probably a bit beyond me at this stage; so I thought I would start with something slightly easier.

Heading yet again to the BBC Food website I found this recipe by James Martin and this one by Nigella Lawson. Both of these looked like they were relatively straightforward to have a go at, so I decided start with Nigella's recipe, making a couple of tiny alterations (such as adding 4tsp of caster sugar to the choux pastry mix), and using a homemade piping bag (basically I cut a small corner off a sandwich bag - actually made a great piping bag) to pipe out the pastry mix instead of simply spooning it out.

This recipe takes a lot of time, patience and energy - stirring in the beaten eggs gradually actually takes a lot out of you, and my arm muscles were definitely aching by the end. However I can say that the end results were definitely worth it. For the first 10 to 15 minutes that the profiteroles were in the oven they didn't change at all; basically they still looked like the piped-out choux pastry batter, which I wasn't very happy about. I started to think that I had definitely messed up somewhere along the way, possibly in mixing the eggs into the batter. Then in the final five minutes they suddenly changed beyond recognition. They puffed up and they actually looked like profiteroles - it was amazing.

Profiteroles!!

I was pretty chuffed as this is my very first attempt at choux pastry. Now obviously they were not completely perfect; some of the profiteroles around the edges of the layout of the tray had not quite browned as much as I wanted them to, and two of them, when I attempted to take them off the baking paper, actually came away leaving the base of the profiteroles behind. Still, that left me with plenty more profiteroles to fill with the sugared cream and then to top with some melted chocolate. Testing them myself, I thought that they actually tasted quite nice, but I am never a very good judge of my own cooking and my neurotic brain means that I always have to have someone else say that it's actually okay. Therefore, I took some of the profiteroles over to my friend S, and was delighted when she and her family really liked them as well. I have since made these for my housemate L and her boyfriend, who both seemed to rather enjoy them, so I'll mark these down as another success.

Beckie.