Octopus Pie

Glorious Eggs

What a great way to start out your new year (unless of course you resolved to lose weight). Cream Puffs, another recipe where eggs play the starring role! These are a major weakness for me. They are so sophisticated looking no matter if you pipe them through a pastry bag or plop them on a cookie sheet straight from a spoon. You can fill them with savory spreads for an appetizer, or a scoop of vanilla ice cream topped with homemade hot fudge sauce.

My love affair with this pastry began belly up to the ice cream counter at Sanders in Detroit. The most famous of their parlours resided in the J.L. Hudson department store, in downtown Detroit. Sanders supplied the city with confections beginning in  1875. The ice cream shops are long gone but my mom still finds and sends jars of the hot fudge topping (it’s not as good as I remember). You can use a mixer to combine the puff ingredients, but I think the ritual of hand mixing this pastry is rewarding and the consistency of the puff is lighter. I’ll warn you though, it is not an easy mix! This recipe comes out of a local Vermont restaurant, River Run in Plainfield.

For the pastry:

1 cup water

8 T. (1 stick) unsalted butter

1 c. all-purpose flour

generous pinch of salt

4 eggs, at room temperature

For the chocolate filling

8 ou. semisweet chocolate

6 ou. cream cheese (about 3/4 c.) at room temperature

1/2 c. confectioner’s sugar

3/4 c. heavy cream

Preheat oven to 400′F

First you want to make the pastry. In a heavy saucepan, combine the water and butter and bring to a boil over low heat. Slowly add flour and salt, stirring constantly until the mixture begins to pull away from the side of the pan. Remove the pan from the heat and add eggs, one at a time, beating quickly and continuously. This is a crucial stage, if you don’t add the eggs one at a time and keep mixing them constantly they will begin to cook on their own and you will have scrambled eggs instead of cream puffs.

Tablespoons of puff batter ready for the oven

At this point you could put the slightly cooled pastry into a pastry bag and pipe fancy bits onto an ungreased baking sheets. For lack of time I will take a tablespoon and scoop free form mounds onto the sheets, I think they look just as delicious. The puffs should be barely touching. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until lightly browned. Cool completely on cooling racks.

Once the puffs have completely cooled, slice them open and carefully scoop out the moist pastry, leaving an empty shell for stuffing. If you don’t remove this moist layer the puffs will become soggy (my family gobbles the filling up as fast as the puffs!)

Make the filling. Melt 6 ou. of chopped chocolate in a double boiler over barely simmering water. Allow to cool a bit, registering 100 degrees on an instant read thermometer. In a large mixing bowl, beat the cream cheese, and sugar together until very creamy and light. Beat in the cooled, melted chocolate.

In another bowl, beat the whipping cream until stiff peaks form. Carefully fold the whip cream into the chocolate mix. This is another crucial stage, if you don’t gently fold the whip cream into the other mixture the cream will deflate and the filling will not have a great consistency.

Chocolate filled Cream Puffs

Fill the puffs with the filling and place on a platter. Melt the remaining chocolate in the double boiler, stirring until smooth and drizzle over the filled puffs. Sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar. Refrigerate until ready to serve.