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Coffee Eclairs
Prepare the eclairs exactly the same as chocolate eclairs but adding one tablespoon very strong-made coffee to the creme patissiere and substituting the glace au cafe for the glace au chocolate.
This is a variation entry: it assumes you already have the book's chocolate eclair method, which means choux paste, crème pâtissière and a poured fondant glaze. The notes below cover what changes and what the original leaves unsaid.
- What you are actually makingChoux paste piped in fingers about 4 inches long, baked, split or pierced, filled with pastry cream, then glazed on top. Nothing in the coffee version alters the paste itself.
- Oven heatThe recipe says nothing about baking; the chocolate entry it refers back to would carry whatever direction there is. Modern practice for choux is a hot start to raise steam and a slower finish to dry the shell, in the region of 425F for about 15 minutes then 350F for another 15 to 20, until the eclairs are deep gold and light in the hand. Opening the door early collapses them.
- "Very strong-made coffee"This means a black infusion far stronger than table coffee. A shot of espresso, or a teaspoon of instant dissolved in a tablespoon of hot water, gives the intended punch. A tablespoon of ordinary brewed coffee will carry very little flavour into the cream.
- Adding it to the crème pâtissièreStir the coffee in off the heat, once the custard has thickened and been taken from the stove. Added at the start it can encourage the cream to break or loosen.
- Glace au caféGlace au cafe -- a glace in this sense is a poured icing rather than a buttercream: fondant or sifted confectioners' sugar slackened with strong coffee, warmed only slightly so that it flows and sets with a sheen. The book's own coffee glaze is not given here, only named. It should coat the top of the eclair and stop there.
- Fill lateFilled eclairs soften within a couple of hours. Bake and glaze ahead if you like, but pipe the cream in shortly before serving.
- Keep the cream coldCrème pâtissière is an egg-and-milk custard and belongs in the refrigerator until it goes into the shells. Cool it fast, with a film pressed onto the surface, and use it within two days.
- YieldThe quantities are in the chocolate entry, not here. As a general guide, a choux batch made with about 1 cup of flour gives roughly a dozen eclairs of this size.
Eclairs are French and comparatively modern as pastries go: pâte à choux itself is generally traced, by tradition at least, to sixteenth-century Italian and French court cooking, but the glazed, cream-filled finger under the name éclair appears in French pastry literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it is often said the name — "lightning" — refers to how quickly the thing is eaten. The entry's shape is characteristic of period cookbooks aimed at cooks working through a chapter in order: rather than reprint the whole method, the author gives only the two substitutions. Coffee and chocolate were the two standard eclair flavours in French practice, and remain so.