I first ate these at one my favorite bakeries in Portland - St. Honore. Since then, I've been obsessed with tracking down the best chouquettes every time I visit Paris...
It is made with choux pastry which is extremely easy and has a multitude of applications and I really need to start doing this more often.
Traditionally these pastries are sprinkled with pearl sugar which gives it the crunchy white bits I love but I used turbinado sugar I had at home. Surprisingly, they turned out really, really good! These are great plain but this time I served it with milk jam from my recent trip to Paris which made for a really great combination.
Ingredients:
for the choux pastry:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 stick butter
3 eggs
1 cup water
1 tbsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
4 tbsp. turbinado sugar
2 tbsp cream or milk
Method:
Heat the water, sugar, salt, butter in a sauce pan until simmering. Remove from heat, add the flour, combine and return to the heat. Keep stirring with a wooden spoon until it is well combined and the dough forms a ball without sticking to the sides of the pan. This should really take less than a minute.
Remove the pan from heat and add the eggs, one at a time. After each egg is added, keep stirring vigorously until the egg is completely absorbed. The end result should be a very eggy, tacky pastry dough. Chill the dough in the fridge for 30 mins. to 1 hour.
Heat the oven to 400F. Pipe walnut sized portions of the pastry dough onto a parchment sheet leaving some space between them. Brush with the cream or milk and sprinkle with the turbinado sugar. Bake for 20 mins. until they are golden and risen into delicate puffs.
