Chocolate eclairs

I've always shyed away from trying choux pastry, because of vague memory of someone (no idea who) telling me it was really hard to get right.

Then a few weeks ago on My Kitchen Rules I saw two cops from Tasmania not only nail it, but do it en masse, at short notice, for hundreds of kids and parents. Not only that, they did well enough to earn kudos from a world class French chef. So I thought if they can pull that off, how hard can choux pastry really be?

As it turns out it's not hard at all, as long as you know exactly what you're doing.

The recipe I used came from a copy of French Cooking Made Easy that my mum bought me way back in 1997 when I first started studying French in school. It was my bible for many a French cooking project at school, and I still crack it out from time to time. The photography is a bit daggy, but the food I've made from this book always tastes great. I read the recipe over and over and over again, then read it once more to make sure I totally understood the process I was undertaking, then dove right in.

The pastry took me only ten minutes to make. The hardest part I found was stirring the flour into the boiled water and butter mixture, you have to stir really quickly to get a smooth consistency, and it goes into a stiff ball quite quickly, so stirring it took all my upper arm strength. Luckily after that the electric mixer does all the work as you add the eggs.

I'm proud to say I nailed my chocolate eclairs. The pastry turned out so nice and crispy, and using cream I'd whipped myself they tasted so much better than eclairs you buy in the shop. Ironcally the bit I got wrong was not the choux pastry I'd always believed was so hard to make, but the chocolate I put on the top. Chocolate being an ingredient I have much experience with. It seized, and became hard to spread.