Cream Puffs

Cream puffs are one of those desserts that look great, taste great, and will generally impress the hell out of dinner guests. The truth is that well-disciplined fifth grader can easily make these things. Honest. Take a look.

Cream puffs have two components: cream and puff. Duh, dumbass.

First, we'll make pastry cream. To make about 2.5 cups of cream, you'll need a half cup of sugar, 6 egg yolks, a quarter cup of flour, 2 cups of milk, a vanilla bean, and a pinch of salt. If you want to flavor the cream, and you can do so very easily, get some lemon zest, grated ginger, or whatever it is you want up in there.

In a big bowl, whisk your sugar and egg yolks together until you get a thick cream, then whisk in the flour a little bit at a time. Toss that pinch of salt in there, too.

Put the milk in a saucepan with the vanilla bean and boil.

Take out the bean and pour the milk into the egg/sugar/flour slowly, stirring like an old lady with nothing better to do than stir slowly.

When all the milk has gone into the bowl, put the whole mess back into the saucepan. Stir like a madman and bring it to a boil. You can also stir in your zest or whatever you want to flavor the cream at this point. After about two bubbly minutes, take it off the heat and stir just a minute more.

At this point, you just chill the cream in the fridge. You can have it in there for a few days if you're not using it right away. A skin is going to form, but you can just skim it off before you use it.

Now, the puffs. Puffs are made of a pastry dough called chou, which is pronounced like "shoe" and not "whatchou lookin' at?" For enough chou for 16 little puffs, you'll need a cup of flour, a cup of water, a stick of butter, 4 eggs, and a teaspoon of salt. Preheat the oven to 400 F.

A pastry bag won't be needed for this adventure, as you'll see below, but you should have one of those big syringe doodads used for cake decorating on hand. We got a cheap plastic one at the 99 cent store that just barely worked well enough for a big batch of puffs. Having since acquired a sturdy metal one, we can say that it's well worth the extra bucks if you like to bake pretty things with any frequency.

So first you sift the flour and salt together in a small bowl. Put the butter and water in a saucepan and heat over low flame until the butter is melted, then bring it up to a boil.

Once boiling, turn off the heat and dump the flour/salt into the water/butter. Stir it all together and it'll combine all goopy-like.

Turn the heat back on to medium, and stir until the dough becomes a solid ball that peels away from the pan. When that happens, lower the heat and keep stirring until the dough gets a little bit more dry.

Take it off to cool a few minutes before you stuff it into your pastry bag. No bag, no problem: take any clean plastic baggie and make a small hole in one corner. Voila, a pastry bag.

Pipe little mounds of chou onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper (not wax paper!), keeping the size consistent and leaving spaces between them as big as the mounds themselves. They puff up, remember?

Bake for 20 minutes or so, or until they've doubled in size and turned golden brown. They should feel firm when you pick them up.

Rip them a new one with a chopstick or some such and pop them back in the oven for a couple minutes so they dry out a little inside.

Cool the puffs completely on a baking rack before filling up your syringe doodad with cream and having at them. Stuff carefully, lest they burst. Refrigerate the filled puffs if you're not serving them immediately.