I d'eclair!!!

And the Daring Baker's strike again!!!

This month's challenge was ... guess??? Eclairs!!!

The elements of this challenge were three-fold... eclair shells, a pastry cream filling and a glaze... chocolate was a required ingredient but we had the choice of either a chocolate pastry cream or a chocolate glaze... or both!

The first challenge was making pastry shells, and preventing them from collapsing flat... To accomplish this, halfway through the baking, i had to rotate the two pans and prop the oven door open to allow any steam to escape and help the shells stay puffed up... One tray made it out fine but the other flattened out and remained moist in center, but so. what. ... Once they were out of the oven, I cut them in half, and set the tops on a rack to make it easy to drizzle them with the glaze

The pastry cream and glaze were the easy parts and, since we had a choice, we decided to make a bittersweet chocolate glaze for the tops and Steven was the lucky one to glaze them... See?








Now, I mentioned we had the choice of flavors for either the glaze or the pastry cream, but one HAD to be chocolate, and since we used chocolate for the glaze, I decided to go a little tropical for the pastry cream... We thought about mango but I had an inspiration and went with kiwi! I had Steven pipe the cream as opposed to spooning and this is what they looked like, post-piping...





The kiwi gave the eclairs a beautifully earthy sweetness, and in the end, they looked like this...








Of course, Steven and I took them to our respective jobs where they promptly disappeared... I d-eclair!!!

I'm excited about our upcoming open-house at the commercial kitchen that we rent occassionally... Lot's of stuff available for tasting and some things available to buy and take home to enjoy... More news to come VERY shortly!!!