How To Make Cream Puffs

Cream puffs. Chocolate éclairs. Pâte à choux … well, not quite. This is a quick little puff pastry recipe that you can throw together quicker than you can defrost the frozen ones from Costco.

It’s less sweet than the version at Jenni’s link, so (in my opinion) it’s more of a blank slate for what you want to fill them or top them with. Her recipe is the more traditional one.

Ingredients

½ cup butter (1 stick)
1 cup water
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 eggs
(Double recipe is shown — except the eggs, see note at the end.)

Directions

Preheat oven to 425°F.

In a large pot, bring water and butter to a rolling boil.

Add the flour and salt all at once, and stir quickly until the mixture forms a ball.

Transfer the dough to a large mixing bowl. Let it cool a little so it doesn’t cook the eggs. Then, using a wooden spoon or stand mixer, beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each.

Load the dough into a piping bag or — if you’ve got one of these — a dessert decorator, and make little golf-ball-sized mounds

Since this was our first time making them, we tried a bunch of shapes: short and fat, tall and skinny, pointed, rounded, twisty.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in the preheated oven, until golden brown. Centers should be dry.

You can see that ours didn’t grow all that much.

For a better rise, cook at a higher temperature and beat the eggs in better.

UPDATE: A reader told me that a half-cup of butter is one stick, and I show two in the picture. Yup, she’s right. We doubled this recipe … except for the eggs. Oops. That explains why they were a little flat.

These tasted great, but were a little hard to fill.

Speaking of filling, stick around, I’ll have the recipe for the custard cream shortly.