After watching an episode of the Polish edition of Masterchef in which the participants prepared eclairs I thought- well well, I have never made eclairs, how do they make them, anyway? I do not actually remember anybody inviting me and offering homemade eclairs. Indeed, hundreds of times there were cheesecakes, cookies, tarts, poppy seed cakes, and even donuts, but eclairs? My assumption was that you buy eclairs at the bakery...
Well, after conducting short interviews with friends and searching on the Internet I found out that ... people make eclairs! And they are not too difficult to make! So I accepted the challenge and this weekend I baked eclairs ... and they even turned out pretty good :) ... the disadvantage is that they are a bit time-consuming, but if you care about baking at home rather than buying it ready-made from the store ... it's nothing difficult!
Ingredients for the dough:
-250 ml of milk
-150 g of wheat flour
-50 g of butter
-5 eggs (free-range)
-a pinch of salt
Ingredients for the vanilla filling:
-500 ml of milk
-6 yolks
-2/3 cup sugar
-1/3 cup of potato starch
-1 teaspoon of real vanilla sugar or grains from a half of a vanilla pod
-250g butter
Ingredients for the chocolate topping:
-100 grams of dark chocolate
-50 g of butter or margarine
First make the vanilla filling because it requires cooling. In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks and add a half cup of milk, vanilla sugar, sugar and potato starch. Combine all the ingredients together. Bring the milk to boil in a saucepan, reduce the flame and stirring slowly pour the content of the bowl. The custard will begin to thicken. Boil it for about 1 minute stirring constantly. Leave to cool. Do not mix!
In the meantime, start making the pastry. Pour the milk into a large pot. Add the butter and salt. When the ingredients begin to boil, add the flour (all at once), mix vigorously (preferably with a wooden spoon). The ingredients will combine into one big dumpling. Heat it for approx. 2 more minutes stirring constantly. Add 1 egg, mix and cool down the dough for approx. 20 minutes. After this time, add the eggs- one by one and knead the dough. After adding each egg the dough will fall into pieces but then after mixing it will return to the previous consistency.
Preheat the oven to approx. 200 degrees (convection oven to 180).
Line the metal form with some baking paper. Form the eclairs with a pastry bag. They should have the length of approx. 8-10 cm and they do not need to be too thick, because they will grow during baking.
Bake the eclairs until they become golden brown and hard. It is better to bake them too long rather than too short, because then they will have unwanted doughy consistency. After removing the eclairs from the oven cut them into halves and cool.
Go back to the vanilla cream :) In a large bowl mix the butter and VERY SLOWLY add in small amounts of the vanilla pudding. Stir all the time.
Melt the chocolate and butter in a water bath and stir until just combined. Dip the upper parts of the eclairs and set aside.
Stuff the eclairs with vanilla cream and cover with the upper chocolate parts. Enjoy :)
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