I'm back!
Wow! It feels like forever since I've typed on these pages. Between TypePad's issues and my schedule it's been challenging finding the time to blog. But, while I've been absent on the blogging scene I have at least kept busy in the kitchen. Of course not all of my stories are worthy of sharing in detail, like the flour-less chocolate cake that fell apart when I didn't have enough time to chill it, or the chocolate pudding cake recipe that turned into a 90% chocolate pudding when I tried to half the recipe but accidentally used the full amount of eggs. In the end both still tasted quite good, though they certainly lacked eye appeal.
Luckily, with the bad also came some good.
These eclairs that I made for a baby shower at work fall under 'the good' category. They were light and airy with a pudding-like chocolate almond pastry cream filling. The fact that they turned out to be baby eclairs was a complete accident however, I just thought they'd puff up a lot more in the oven than they did.
The pate choix, ganache and pastry creams were easy to make and the whole effort proved to be more time consuming than difficult. Once the pate choix is cooked it has to be piped into cigars (big ones btw), baked, chilled, and iced with ganache. I held off filling them with pastry cream until the next morning to keep then from getting soggy and so I could have the left over chocolate pastry cream for breakfast. Yum.



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