What's crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside? That's right. Cream Puffs.

    So today during school I decided to attempt one of my favorite desserts. Cream Puffs. Now normally, I would think this to be a ridiculous task that is only meant for those baking gods, who have have many years even decades to perfect their sweets. However today I was feeling cocky for no particular reason, head in the clouds i suspect, and attempted this once again. I have tried in the past but it didn't work out correctly. So I set out to make the Pastry cream first. not a particularly hard ordeal, though I did have to strain it post-production to get it the consistency i wanted. I already had some wonderful Praline Powder on hand. (Praline Powder is a fine dust of caramelized sugar and roasted pecans.) So that went into the Cream, which turned out lovely. Next is presumably the easiest part; Choux pastry.

     My brother convinced me to use All-Purpose flour, like the recipe stated. Up until this point I had been using Bread flour since I thought that was all we had. So I did everything as usual. Total disaster when I tried to bake them. They didn't puff up like they're supposed to, they stayed flat disks. Which got me quite upset. So I threw them away and started over (Though my mom fished them out later and ate them....weird I know.) This time I used bread flour and Voila. they worked like magic. So I stuck the bottoms with a chop-stick (A cheap but effective way to make a whole to pipe the cream into). I used my mom's paper cake decorating bags with a plain circle tip, to pipe the cream into the bottoms of the puff shells. Wonderful, Then I placed them as neatly as i could onto a plate, dusted them with powdered sugar and cocoa powder. And that's it. easy, fairly time consuming, but so worth it in the end.

Marbled Halls

My latest (first on here) creation was to attempt marbling two different colors of chocolate. I decided to make the base of melted vanilla candy coating, (this is similar to chocolate and tastes almost as good, however is easier to melt and mold.) and drizzle it over a sheet of freezer paper that was laid out on a cookie sheet. This worked fine and I put the concoction outside on the lid of the freezer in my garage, given that i live in Utah and it is the beginning January this is currently the "worlds largest walk-in fridge". The candy coating froze in just over an hour and I was in a position to continue with the second half of this process. I melted more blocks of candy coating I had, which was brown and tastes like milk chocolate.
I melted this and poured it over the frozen spider web of vanilla already on the sheet. I used my mom's Pastry knife (I think that's what it is called) and spread the chocolate evenly over the sheet as far as it would reach. The vanilla was beginning to melt quickly with the molten chocolate on top so I had to work fast. With this portion of the experiment completed I turned to the next step; Cupcakes to go under this sweet. That part is always easy, I just used a German Chocolate cake mix which was not so carefully divided into multi-colored paper cups. These baked and cooled I used some left over frosting, from when i asked my boyfriend to preference last month, to decorate the tops. With this done I used some leaf cuts to make shapes from the chocolate which was now hard. That worked fine so it's onto the future.
Next came the part at which I am very lacking of in the brain department, artistry. I had to balance the chocolate leaves atop the light butter cream frosting used. I somehow managed to get this to look fairly decent, but something was missing. *pause to look* "......." *epiphany* There were still chunks of the candy coating left, so I took our butcher knife (the rest were dirty and I didn't want to take the time to clean them.) And carefully obliterated the candy. After I sprinkled the dust on the cupcakes, I was finally happy that they looked complete but sloppy. So I set them up for a picture and had to be all artsy-fartsy again.

Experiment complete, Pictures will be posted soon. Or when I figure out how to get them onto my computer. Good Luck to all of you if you decide to try this.

<(Good food always comes to those who love to Cook.)>