Remember the pate a choux I’ve frozen last Saturday? Well, I used it today! My first intention was to make Napoleons using this quick puff pastry recipe that I have been wanting to try for a while. But, since there is not a habit of labeling the flours in our house, I accidentally used a low gluten, whole-wheat flour, and the puff pastry didn’t puff. And I had already prepared pastry cream to make Napoleons. So, I used my frozen pate a choux and made cream puffs!

And to make things more interesting, I topped the puffs with orange chocolate and sprinkled peppermint candy! The recipe was a success, seriously everybody loved these puffs! And because of that, I suggest you to always freeze half of every dough you prepare, just in case..

Chocolate Peppermint Cream Puffs

makes 40 cream puffs

For pate a choux:

- Use the recipe here. Omit sugar pearls.

Ingredients:

For pastry cream:

• 500 ml milk
• 2 eggs
• 150 gr sugar (5.3 oz.)
• 75 gr (2.65 oz.) cornstarch

For topping:

• 80 gr dark chocolate with orange, melted
• 3-4 peppermint candies, crushed
• 1-2 tablespoons milk, hot

Directions:

Heat the milk. In a separate bowl, mix all the other ingredients. When the milk is boiled, pour 3 tablespoons of it to the egg mixture and whisk quickly, so you don’t get cooked egg clumps in your cream! Then, pour this egg mixture to boiled milk and stir for one minute and take the cream off heat.

When the pastry cream and choux puffs are completely cooled, cut the puffs into half and fill them with pastry cream.

Mix the melted chocolate and milk. Pour this over the choux puffs. Sprinkle with crushed peppermint candies.

Oh, and don’t forget the Insatgram photos:

Well, I know the eclairs in the photo do not look nice and cool, but their taste is inversely proportional to how they look.. Really.. The reason for their bad appearance is due to a little accident. After I finished making my tiny eclairs, the plate they’re on fell off to the kitchen table and their chocolate glaze was all over the place.. I think I’m never going to make some good looking food..

In fact, nothing can make me sad about these eclairs, because it’s my third trial so far, and the first two were a complete disaster. I tried to play with the “choux” pastry recipe, put whole-wheat flour instead of all-purpose flour, tried to change the amount of butter, and the dough didn’t rise. So, this time I didn’t take any risk and made my “pâte à choux” directly from here. The directions there were also very useful.

Anyway, after making my little choux pastries, I filled them with pastry cream. Well, I cannot give you the recipe, because I took it from a pastry chef, but you can use this recipe, which I used before. The tricky part is, when I was making the cream, I added 2 tablespoons of honey by decreasing the amount of sugar, and after the cream is chilled, I added 2 mashed bananas into it.

Finally, I poured chocolate glaze on them. The glaze is very simple to make, melt the chocolate and add some melted butter (If you melt 2 units of chocolate, add 1 unit of melted butter).