Strawberry Choux au Craquelin
Happy Belated New Year's Eve!
Confession time... I bake my face off. I am not young (but I am young at heart!). And before last night, I had not made a Pâte à Choux. Can you believe it? Me neither!
I couldn't let another opportunity pass me by. I had a whole dinner feast planned, and I committed to crowning the whole evening with these strawberry choux au craquelin from Food52 with this honey and vanilla pastry cream. Hell yes.
Planning!
Now, to start, I’m personally confused by the name because I have made craquelins, and to me it means brioche buns with candied citrus and a sugar cube in the center. But in this context, it’s a real thing that is internet-searchable and consistently appeared to be a standard profiterole but with a crackly cookie top rather than a ganache glaze. Also it seems pretty universal that the cookies involve only brown sugar (as opposed to granulated sugar) which contributes to the way the dough melts over the choux, because they do bake together, which I think is pretty mind blowing.
This was my first choux, and obviously my first choux au craquelin (but not my first pastry cream). After reading up on choux in general and reading this recipe a bunch of times, I decided to follow it to the letter and also do the substitution it suggests for strawberry cookies, by whizzing up a ton of freeze dried strawberries to make the strawberry powder.
The only change I decided to make really make was not to make the diplomat cream. I do push the limits of my lactose intolerance, but I absolutely can't do heavy cream. I decided to make a full portion of pastry cream and fill the cream puffs rather than slice them like profiteroles.
Cooking!
First, the cookies. It's a lovely soft dough that came together just as written. After chilling it in the fridge overnight, I rolled it out to 1/4" thickness and cut out my sixteen cookies. I had already done my parchment molds with a 2.5” cutter but then it looked like I’d run out of cookie dough, so I cut the cookies to 2” and made a mental note to pipe out the choux to “inside the lines,” trying to eyeball the half inch difference so they’d be the same size.
The choux was going to be the trickiest, but it all happened as if I'd been doing it for years! I was super proud of myself, though of course still nervous that I'd skipped a step and never noticed.
I placed the cookies carefully on top of the choux. I couldn't believe this was right because the cookies were so thick. But I had promised myself to have faith, so into the oven they went.
crazy proportions
And they came out looking stunning! Nice sturdy bottoms, gorgeous cracked tops, just carmelized edges. HOLY WOW!
victory lap!!!!!!
While they were cooling, I made the pastry cream and then popped it in the fridge to get a full chill.
After dinner (and then another hour just to digest our amazing risotto), I fired up the ol' mechanical pastry bag and filled just half of the puffs. After all, there WERE only two of us, and four puffs each must surely be enough, right?
The doctor is in.
We ate them all.
