Choux

Lol. Continuing on with that activated charcoal trend :p. It makes all the colors pop! Charcoal makes batters more runny, so you might even want to use less. And it also drastically changes baking time for at least this recipe.

1. Charcoal Choux Pastry: [for about 25-30 cream puffs]

• 200 g water
• 125 g milk
• 112 g butter (stick, cut into small pieces)
• 4 g salt
• 4 g sugar
• 150 g flour
• 12 g activated charcoal
• 3 large eggs

1. Preheat oven to 400F.
2. Add milk, water, butter, sugar, and salt into a saucepan and bring to boil. You want your butter to have melted prior to boiling, so make sure you cut up the stick of butter into small pieces.
3. Sift out the flour and add the charcoal. I whisk this up to make a nice blended mixture
4. Take the saucepan off the heat, and add in the sifted flour and charcoal. Stir in (wooden spoon is best) the flour until everything comes together into a ball.
5. Return to heat and stir vigorously until you start to see some dried residue on the side (3-4 minutes minutes). Sometimes if I’m not sure, I just stir for longer. In my experience, having less liquid in that dough is better.
6. Transfer the dough into a bowl and beat until steam no longer rises. If it’s in a stand mixer, until the bowl is no longer hot to the touch. You don’t want to scramble your eggs that you’re about to incorporate.
7. One at a time, beat in the eggs. Be patient and don’t add them all at once.
8. Dough/ batter should now be a bit droopy. Add to a piping bag with a large round tip.
9. Pipe you desired size onto a silpat or parchment paper (though, silpats are awesome and everyone should use them).
10. Grab a small bowl of water and using your finger dipped in water, flatten all the points which resulted from piping them. Those little points will burn in the oven, so flatten those and any other pointy edges which may be on your silpat.
11. Charcoal really changed up the baking parameters. They take much longer and you can’t see if it’s browning or not, so you have to press lightly to see if they’re solid yet. Bake for 35 minutes at 400F. Then drop the temperature down to 300F and bake for 20 more minutes.
    • Opening the oven during the first 30 minutes will cause them to collapse on themselves. You want the puffs to form a solid structure.
12. Now open the oven and without pulling out the pan, press lightly on the puffs to see if they’re solid. If they are, you want to stab holes in the bottom. I have a long pointy piping tip that I now use, but I used to use a chopstick and that worked perfectly fine. 1. Go through and poke holes in the solid cream puffs and then put them back onto the pan on their side. Removing the pan from the oven will cause the ones that aren’t fully set yet to collapse, so make sure to leave it in.
13. If all the puffs have been stabbed, then you can bake for maybe 15 more minutes at 250F. You can turn off oven and leave them in to dry out even more.
14. If the cream puffs aren’t fully baked yet, drop the temperature down to 250F and bake for another 15 minutes. After that, check back every 10 minutes to see. Once they are all stabbed, turn off oven and leave the pan inside for the puffs to dry out.
15. Once the insides have dried (you can check a tester), take the pan out and let fully cool.

2. Raspberry Diplomat Cream: (Not 100% sure this is what it’s called)

Black sesame is delicious and so is choux, so they make a great combo :). There are a few components here. The choux pastry, the black sesame diplomat cream filling, and the glaze (which really is just white chocolate with some food coloring).

updated 12/2020: I’ve updated the diplomat cream to increase the amount (a la Black sesame crepe cake)

Also take a look at Useful Recipes: Cream Puffs to see how to make a craquelin, which is also super delicious.

UPDATE 2019 I now use 55 g almond flour, 50 g powdered sugar, 45 g egg whites, 45 g granulated sugar and bake for 25 min at 285F.

Mmkay, so right off the bat the vision I had in my head was that I could make flan and then blend it into a thick custard that I could then pipe into the cream puffs. This won’t work. It will basically return it to a liquid, a thick liquid..but definitely not pipeable. At this point, I was like “incorporate it into a whipped cream!,” but then I added basically way too much flan liquid and had to do a subsequent whipped cream incorporation to get a consistency that was okay. Below I’ll list something that I’m sure will work way better.

Choux is super simple and delicious. I’ve tried adding flavorings to it, but since there’s so much butter it’s difficult. I’d say just focus on the filling flavor. Here I’ll talk about hojicha flavored diplomat cream, with commentary if you want to do a fruit flavor. Any flavor works. With or without the puree or powder. For the best result, add flavoring to both the custard and whipped cream.

Also started adding craquelin (crunch part on top). It’s pretty awesome. Will include the recipe but it’s not necessary.