Baking is like any other skill - takes practice.
You should! Choux is one of my favourite pastries, light and actually it’s savory, great with many types of pastry cream or with whipped cream, it can be also used as savoury appetizers like salmon, scallops, eggsetc.
Have a written out recipe for me to follow, naf? I’m willing to try.
I used French books but it’s very well explained here.
If you don’t want to pipe the cream inside the shell, you can slice the choux like a baguette and pipe (or spread) the cream inside.
Thanks naf. My pipping skills…should be interesting!
The post is quite good as it discusses all the possible problems. Perfect piping skills comes with practice. Mine is non existant.
We had a bakery in the Baltimore area that did this. You can “fill” more cream this way, if that’s your thing.
Also it’s kind of discouraging when y’all are making great pastries and say your skills are lacking.
Oh yes! For cream puff, the cream is sandwiched between a cut open choux pastry.
Thanks. I’m learning. Pastry and baking doesn’t come naturally for me. I’m more comfortable in intuition and cooking than being disciplined and scientifically precise. For a long time, I don’t even like the feeling of wet flour sticking on my hands. For piping, I have to admit I’m quite bad.
For H’s birthday (a few months ago), I let him chose a cake of his choice in a pastry magazine, I was thinking it would be a fruit tart or something like that because it was his thing, but his choice was an entremet made with layers of choux, praline, caramel, chocolate and whipped cream. He had digestion problem back then and the cake was postponed, now I think it’s time that I honour my word. LOL, that thing is impossible to make! I’ll better spend some time whipping up some cream and start practicing piping.
oops, posted in wrong spot!
Saint Honneur is a dream come true dessert …
Best wishes !!!
Just a fun bread baking reminder to all my fellow HOs/inspirations that this bread recipe was the biggest surprise and my absolute favorite last year. Worth re-sharing.
Beautiful!
Looks and sounds fabulous!
Thanks ! I halved the recipe so we wouldn’t wind up freezing any. Enjoy with apricot jam too.
I had a bagel baking weekend somehow - had been meaning to try a new GF recipe after the fancy GF bakery bagels were a dud.
I had picked two new recipes, one using a mix of flours, the other using GF AP and adjusting to create “bread” flour. Half recipe each - 4-5 bagels. The second recipe was the clear winner - indistinguishable from regular bagels once toasted: I was astounded.
Then I decided to make some regular bagels for those of us still eating wheat. I forgot to check my notes from last time, which said to reduce the liquid. So, they splatted a bit (again) - in NYC they call these “flagels”
In time for St. Patrick’s Day I managed to get Irish brown bread the way I remember from a visit to Ireland. Baking breakthrough!
We enjoyed the bread with smoked crabmeat briefly warmed and dressed in butter.
I used this King Arthur recipe for Irish brown bread and KA whole wheat flour, with a few of KA’s recommended adaptations.
As I didn’t have their Irish-style flour, I used all whole wheat. Added an extra 2 teaspoons buttermilk per cup of whole wheat flour used to adjust for the difference between flours.
I thought the color of the loaf was too light on an earlier attempt. So I added a tablespoon of KA’s black cocoa powder to the dry ingredients. Richer color with no change in flavor.
The middle can easily underbake on a dense loaf like this. So I used my trusty Thermapen to know when the center had reached 205F.
Lastly, I don’t have a kitchen scale so I measure rather than weigh the ingredients. KA’s fluff, sprinkle, and scrape technique is handy to make sure you don’t overdo the amount of flour.
I often bake a version from Artisan 5 Minutes that’s more like regular brioche, whereas this one is lighter. For both styles, the dough is a lot easier to handle when cold; you don’t have to use so much flour when handling the dough. Also, like in this video, you always have to stretch/fold/knead a little with these types of enriched doughs. If you bake 20 no-kneads and then bake the traditional kneaded version with softened butter instead of melted butter, you can tell the difference, but otherwise it’s hard to tell them apart.
I love “grilled” chocolate brioche sandwiches paired with vanilla ice cream.