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I got it into my head that I wanted to have a bash at making some choux pastry.

The original plan was for prefitoroles, but then I thought…why make life easy? Why not have a go at some classic chocolate eclairs?

Why not indeed.

I melted some butter in some water (what?)

Before adding flour, some sugar and a pinch of salt

I beat the flour into the wet mix until it formed a ball of dough…only it didn’t really form a ball. It formed a paste and in my stupidness naiveness, I thought that this would be ok. I then let the paste cook off for a couple of minutes, giving it a bash with the spatula now and again.

If it looks like this…it’s wrong.

I removed the mixture from the heat before adding and beating in eggs.  The first egg was a double yolker – WHAT ARE THE CHANCES? – so then I was a bit confused about how many more eggs I should add, plus it was chicken twins, PLUS the yolks are important, but so are whites so OH GOD THIS IS NIGHTMARE.

I landed on the side of adding less eggs, so I only beat in two more.

Instead of thinking at this point “This dough looks a bit sloppy, I should probably stop adding liquids” I beat in another egg. Which left me with this:

Let’s skim over the fact that I actually tried to shove this mixture into a piping bag and make some desparate eclair shape.

*covers eyes*

So I added some more flour to the mixture to make it more dough-like. I vacillated between putting the dough over the heat and cooking out the flour and doing something weird to the eggs, or keeping the dough cool and not fucking it all up completely. A mixture of the two seemed like the worst possible option, so of course, this was the route I took.

I managed to get a somewhat dough like substance, and piped some strips onto a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper.

Right. If you’ve followed this so far and are thinking…”Oh, it’ll be OK” then you really need to read the rest of my blog. It certainly WON’T be OK, and it certainly WILL make me swear a lot. So you might want to bail out at this point if you are of a sensitive nature.

Baked the fuckers. The fuckers didn’t rise, the fuckers didn’t brown, the fuckers were fucked.

They were as flat as pitta bread once cooled. There was no way they could be split in half and stuffed with cream.

DING DING!

Round TWO.

So, I’ve paid good money for cream and butter and chocolate. I’m not prepared to let the ingredients go to waste, and so I start again. Mum told me that she’d tried to make choux pastry for a dinner party back in the ’70′s three times before she succeeded. She said this while giggling behind her hands.

Damn Her.

Butter and water. BOIL THE BASTARDS.

FLOUR IN

BEAT IT.

EGG IN

2ND EGG IN

3RD EGG

FINAL DOUGH

Into a piping bag with a nozzle. In retrospect I would leave the nozzle off and pipe straight from the bag.

PIPE THE STUFF

BAKE.

TA DAH!

I whipped the cream

And then got on with the chocolate glaze.

So, I decided to half the glaze and only make enough eclairs for 4 of us – I can freeze four of the pastries.

Half the chocolate into a saucepan with some water, and then I forgot that I was halving the recipe so I shoved the full amount of icing sugar and cocoa power into a bowl and, well..

A drop of water sorted that out.

I halved the buns. There were three types.

The good:

The bad

And the ugly

The buns were cut in half, and piped with whipped cream

And then I topped them with the chocolate icing

Here we go with an ostentaciouis picture

They are delicious though.

*ominous silence*

You can find the recipe I used here.