In other words, today is the Daring Bakers posting day.
This month, in case you've been hiding under a rock this morning, we are making Chocolate Eclairs from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme
.
In the course of my eighteen months as a Daring Baker I have had the pleasure of making pate a choux, pastry cream, and lots and lots of chocolate glaze but I hadn't been able to put them all together, until this month that is. Thus using one of Lisa's husband's Sharpies to cross off my baking bucket list, eclairs.
The Culinary Institute of America defines chocolate eclairs as "Loaded with a creamy filling and its delicate, flaky pastry glossed with chocolate icing, the dessert eclair has withstood the test of time as a pastry favorite." And if those eclairs are from the genius of Pierre Herme from a cookbook written by patron saint of Daring Bakers, Dorie Greenspan then that is even better!
I'm not going to bore you with a step by step and blow by blow play of how the recipe went together and/or any kitchen disasters/triumphs as there are over 1,000 blogs of my fellow DBers to provide that entertainment. I'm just going to tell you that these eclairs were pretty easy to make and resulted in a mind blowing impressive dessert, just ask Erica and Chris who shared some with me one evening.
The pastry cream alone is worth doing this recipe for and I guarantee you will want to find a million uses for it, including facials and well....this is a family blog so I won't go into details but trust me, you and your partner could have a lot of fun with it! And for a late night post fun raid of the fridge, you can have leftover eclairs!!
You know what they say about the way to a man's heart right? (wink)
Meeta of What's for Lunch Honey and Tony from Tony Tahhan are hosts for our challenge this month and you can find the recipe on their blogs if you want to give the king of desserts a try. Or, if you want to oogle hundreds and thousands of eclairs without putting inches on your hips I suggest you head over to the Daring Bakers Blogroll and get your fill.
Also, a heads up, I'm taking a break for a few months from Daring Bakers to take care of some personal and professional things going on in my life as well as to refocus my baking/cooking.
For those of you "checking" on the DB posts for participation, our glorious leaders Lisa and Ivonne know and are being super supportive. So, as my alter-ego Norma Shearer
sings in the reel version (he-he) of "The Women" (not that drivel they are showing in the movie theaters this summer/fall), "Don't talk about me while I'm gone...."
