I have been waiting to get to this recipe :). Cream puffs were one of grandmother’s favourite things to make as she found choux pastry very easy to produce. I don’t recall her ever making them for me, but she often recalled how as a teenager in the early 1930s, she learnt to make them at YWCA cooking classes. Having perfected her cream puff making skills, she would make them for the tea parties her father held at their home every weekend for his friends and business clients.
Having heard her talk about cream puffs so much, a few years ago, I retrieved her cream puff recipes (there are a few more in this recipe notebook which I shall post later) and made my first attempt at choux pastry. It certainly wasn’t as easy as grandmother had led me to believe! At this time, grandma was already aged 90 or so and she couldn’t remember the finer points of choux pastry-making to guide me along, so I tried to read up on the web in addition to using her recipe notes. I was so frustrated with the results of my first attempt, that I immediately made a second batch, which I was even more disappointed with! But grandma was very happy I was baking her pet dish and gave the thumbs up to my mediocre cream puffs.
Actually, this is a recipe for choux pastry, as there are no instructions for the cream filling. Grandma told me to use Nestle tinned cream, as that was what she used in the past, and it’s still easily available in Singapore supermarkets.
Note the two sets of measurements, the ones on the left are one-third of the amounts on the right.
[28/12/07 update: see grandma’s alternative instructions for choux pastry here.]
[30/12/07 update: another recipe for cream puffs with custard filling here.]
[22/7/08 update: if you are really keen to go into the intricacies of making choux pastry, have a look a the tips here, and the recipes here and here.]
Leave a comment