This is my first Daring Bakers Challenge. I was excited to find out it was eclairs, because 1. I like them, 2. I can make pate a choux in my sleep, 3. I'd never made eclairs before. We used Pierre Herme's recipe for chocolate eclairs from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme and the challenge was set up so that we had to use the choux recipe exactly as written, and use either the exact same chocolate pastry cream filling or the exact chocolate glaze.

Well, I knew right off that I wanted to use raspberries in mine, and the logical place to put them was the filling, so I made a raspberry puree, added a couple teaspoons of Chambord and sweetened it.



Then, I added most of it to the chocolate pastry cream. I added a little extra chocolate to the pastry cream as well, to try to thicken it a little since I knew the raspberry sauce would thin it. I think I needed either a lot more chocolate or a little less raspberry. It wouldn't hold its shape nicely when I piped it into the eclairs.



Proof that you don't need a chinois. I used a sieve and a wooden spoon to make the puree.



See how red those raspberries are:



The recipe had a lot of fiddly steps, and there are a lot of things I would do differently if/when I make these again. The pate a choux was far too eggy for my taste. I would cut the five eggs to three whole eggs and two egg whites. I would also use bread flour to try to keep them crisp longer.

One sheet of my shells deflated instantaneously when I opened the oven. They still worked for the recipe, but they didn't look as nice. The baking instructions for these had you vent the oven part way through, and other people said they had better results skipping that, and then letting them cool all the way in the oven with the door open and the racks partly pulled out. Some said that piercing the eclair shells immediately to allow steam to escape also helped.

Also, although the glaze was lovely and dark, bittersweet chocolate, it didn't really taste different than any other ganache would, so I would skip the separate chocolate sauce recipe and addition, and just use a good ganache.

The pastry cream was wonderful, though, and except for the issues I brought on myself, I wouldn't change it at all. I kept spooning it into my mouth, and there was a ton of it left over. The recipe said it would make between 20 and 24 eclairs, and I found that I could squeeze about 18 out of the dough, there was just enough glaze and about twice as much pastry cream as necessary.

I used them as Jerome's birthday dessert, and everyone loved them.



We made up for the egginess by piling on the pastry cream.



I couldn't post about them earlier, because I couldn't give away the surprise. Overall, I enjoyed making these. I liked the challenge of following the rules and coming up with my own interpretation to these at the same time. Thank you Tony and Meeta for this month's challenge. I look forward to trying next month's.

Labels: Daring Bakers, Homemaking, Tales from the Kitchen