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French Strawberry Cream Cakes
Shape cream cake mixture oblong, making twelve cakes. Split, and fill with Strawberry Cream Filling.
Éclairs Shape cream cake mixture four and one-half inches long by one inch wide, by forcing through a pastry bag and tube. Bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Split, and fill with vanilla, coffee, or chocolate cream filling. Frost with Confectioners' Frosting to which is added one-third cup melted Fondant, dipping top of éclairs in frosting while it is hot. ¼ lb. butter ½ lb. sugar Grated rind 1 lemon
Two variations on one base: Farmer's "cream cake mixture" is choux paste, the same cooked flour-butter-egg batter used for cream puffs. Everything here depends on baking it dry enough to hold a filling.
- The hinge: bake until dry, and do not peekChoux collapses if the shells come out while the interiors are still damp, and opening the oven early in the bake drops the steam that lifts them. Judge by feel and color rather than the clock: the shells should be deep golden and light, with no give in the sides.
- Oven temperature"moderate oven" is generally taken to mean somewhere around 350-375F, though the book itself gives no thermometer readings. Modern practice usually starts choux at 400-425F for 10-15 minutes to get maximum lift, then drops to 350F to dry the shells out; at four and a half inches the bake may well run longer than the twenty-five minutes given here.
- YieldThe strawberry version is stated as twelve oblong cakes. A standard choux batch of that size gives roughly the same count of éclairs at the dimensions specified, give or take, depending on how heavily you pipe.
- Piping and shapingA plain round tube of about 1/2 inch works for the éclair shape. For the oblong strawberry cakes you can spoon the paste rather than pipe it; the surface will be rougher but they are split and filled anyway.
- Strawberry cream fillingThe book's cream fillings are cooked and thickened, and this one is presumably combined with sweetened berries. Treat it as a custard: fill the shells close to serving and refrigerate anything that waits, since filled choux both sours and goes soggy within hours.
- The fondant in the frostingOne-third cup melted fondant stirred into confectioners' frosting is what gives éclairs their traditional glossy, non-tacky shell rather than a dull sugar glaze. Dip while the frosting is hot and thin, as directed, or it will set too stiff to coat evenly.
- The stray ingredient listThe quarter pound of butter, half pound of sugar, and grated lemon rind belong to the recipe that follows, not to these cakes; the printed page reads as our text now gives it. For the cakes themselves, use the cream cake mixture as cross-referenced.
Choux paste reached American cookbooks as the base for both "cream cakes" and éclairs, the latter name being French for "lightning" and generally traced to nineteenth-century Parisian pastry work; the usual explanation offered is that the glossy top catches the light, though the etymology is traditional rather than documented. Fannie Farmer's habit of building a whole family of pastries from one cross-referenced base mixture is characteristic of the Boston Cooking School method, which taught technique as a set of reusable formulas rather than as a list of unrelated dishes. The "French" in the title is doing period work as well: at the turn of the century it signaled the fashionable confectioner's shop, and a home cook who could turn out filled and fondant-glazed éclairs was demonstrating that a professional skill had come within reach of a domestic kitchen with a good range and a pastry bag.