This is the point in the competition that the recipes have taken a serious step up in difficulty. These eclairs were very time consuming and difficult (I spent all afternoon in the kitchen making them), but they were oh so good.
I was very excited when I heard we would be making these eclairs. First of all, these are two of my favorite flavors, and secondly I've successfully made eclairs before so I at least kind of knew what I was doing. The recipe can be found here.
The first step is making choux pastry. Having made it before and having just done it recently for our anniversary croquembouche, I knew the basics of it. However, I piped it out with a closed star nozzle that I had, but it turned out to be a bad choice because the eclairs were pretty flat. I think it was the fault of the nozzle, not the dough, because they seemed to bake correctly, have the right consistency, and taste right.
You can't really tell from this picture, but it was clear I wouldn't really be able to fill them. So I decided to try again with my other star nozzle, and it turned out much better.
Much better. Next came the creme pat. There was a minute while making the creme pat that I thought it wasn't going to thicken and wasn't going to come together but then all of a sudden it turned and came right together. It was very tasty even without the added raspberry and caramel flavors.
Then came the caramel. Caramel has taken me a lot of practice and a lot of fails to get right, but I've done it correctly a few times now. I've never tried a dry caramel before though, and it scared me a bit. You mean I'm just supposed to cook sugar on the stove without burning it?
Slowly it started melting and turning golden. I read online that dry caramel goes from not done to burnt very quickly, but I was still shocked at how fast it turned. It went from just turning golden to dark amber in just seconds.
This is how it looked when I pulled it off the heat. I think it was just this side of done, as it had just a slight bitter taste to it, but at least it wasn't burned! Then I added cream and butter and salt to it and let it cool.
The raspberries were simpler, as I just had to cook them down with sugar.
Then I went through the effort of straining out the seeds, because I figured eclairs were fancy enough to deserve it. At this point things were getting difficult to take pictures of, as the kitchen was a mess and I had a lot to do. First I mixed half the creme pat with raspberry and half with caramel. Then I filled the eclairs (I only made three of each look nice, cause that was the brief, but I filled almost all of both batches). Then I decorated them. The recipe called for fondant, which I didn't have, and since it was the day before we left for vacation I didn't want to go shopping. So I made up a frosting with strained raspberry juice for the raspberry eclairs and salted caramel sauce for the caramel ones. The frosting tasted really good, and while it looked less polished than fondant, I still think they looked good. I was supposed to dip whole hazelnuts in caramel to decorate the tops of the caramel eclairs, but I only had crushed hazelnuts, so I just sprinkled those on top of the caramel ones and set whole raspberries on the raspberry ones. By the end of the bake, my kitchen looked like this:
But the eclairs looked like this:
So I'd still call that a win. They tasted very delicious. The raspberry ones were our favorite, but I also really liked the caramel ones. They took a lot of work to make, for sure, but I think I would try making them again sometime because they were so tasty. Or at least a simplified version of them. I've been enjoying the treats I've made with choux pastry, and I plan to keep making it!
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