Eclairs

If you’ve ever been intimidated by the thought of making eclairs, I get it. They seem intimidating, right? Those glorious French pastries filled with silky vanilla cream and topped off with a chocolate glaze. They’re decadent and delicate, exquisite pastries that take a bit more time than your average dessert (if your average dessert is a terrible cookie like mine is, anyway). Eclairs involve more steps than many of your average desserts, but I really believe anyone can make these at home, and I’m excited to walk you through all of the steps today. In plenty of detail and plenty of photos (and a video, for good measure). If you’ve made my cream puffs before you won’t have any problem with this recipe. We start with a choux pastry (sounds fancy for a batter that’s just butter, water, flour, and eggs), fill it with pastry cream, and top it off with a chocolate glaze. Let’s break it down, starting with the pastry…

Choux Pastry, & How to Make It:

The oblong shells that we’ll be baking and filling with pastry cream are made of a pastry called “choux pastry” (pronounced like “shoo“) or “pâte à choux”. It’s the base for many pastries like cream puffs, French crullers, gougères, profiteroles, and more. It may sound fancy, but the dough is simple to make: At this point you have your choux pastry, and now it’s time to bake it into shells for our eclairs. Since eclairs are oblong in shape (this shape and the chocolate topping are the only things that differentiate eclairs from cream puffs), we will pipe 4-5″ stripes onto our parchment-lined baking sheet and bake our eclair shells.

Choux Pastry Tips

Baking the pastry is probably the trickiest part of the whole eclair recipe. Don’t bake your pastry enough and the shells will collapse. Bake them too long and they will be too crisp or, worse, burnt. Here are some key things to remember when baking choux pastry (whether for eclairs or not):

Give your pastry space. The shells will grow in the oven, as you can see the difference in size between the first and second images above. Make sure your oven is completely preheated. It’s important that choux pastry be baked on high heat. If your oven hasn’t reached 400F when you add your pastry, it may not bake properly. I really recommend keeping an oven thermometer in your oven at all times, as many ovens run hotter or cooler than they indicate, and often they indicate they are completely preheated before they actually are! Do not open the oven door! Each time you do, your oven temperature drops drastically, and this can keep your eclairs from puffing properly or from staying puffed once they have cooled. Look for golden brown pastry. You do not want to remove your pastry from the oven too soon or it’s likely it will collapse. Use your oven light so you can watch for the pastry to be golden brown and appear dry on the surface. I indicate that the pastry will need to bake for about 30 minutes, but if your eclairs are larger or smaller they could take more or less time.

While your pastry is still hot, you’ll use a sharp knife to pierce each end of the eclair to the center (see second image in collage above). Work quickly and be careful not to burn your fingertips. Once you do this, you’ll return your pastry to the oven and allow it to cool and cook a bit longer to help maintain the structural integrity of the shells. Let them cool completely before filling with pastry cream…

Vanilla Pastry Cream (Eclair Filling)

Pastry cream is wonderful. It’s simple to make, absolutely delicious, versatile, and serves as the base for some of my favorite dessert recipes (like my banana cream pie and coconut cream pie). Here we’re using it as the silky smooth vanilla filling for our eclairs (because let’s face it, choux pastry isn’t all that great to enjoy by itself). I have a step-by-step guide on how to make pastry cream if you need a detailed walkthrough and I make it for you on camera below the recipe, but here are a few key tips:

The pastry cream will need to be made at least several hours in advance; it will need to cool and be chilled before you can use it. You can make pastry cream up to 2 days in advance, if desired. Cook over medium heat. Don’t crank up the heat or your sugars will not dissolve and your mixture will not thicken properly (/it will not be usable!) and may burn. Tempering your eggs is important. I walk you through this in the recipe, but gradually adding a bit of hot cream into your egg mixture prevents the eggs from cooking. When filling your eclairs, fill from both ends. This ensures that the eclair is filled with pastry cream, and not just loaded with it on only one end. Don’t over-fill your pastry shells! The first few times I made this recipe, I absolutely stuffed every shell and only was able to fill a little more than half of them. My eclairs were much too full and were an unpleasant mess to eat. You want to be able to bite into yours and not end up wearing the filling.

The chocolate is the simplest part of this recipe, just whisk together melted chocolate, butter, powdered sugar, and water until you have a glossy chocolate coating and then spread it over your eclairs or dip each shell in chocolate.

How to Store

Store eclairs in the refrigerator in an airtight container for up to 3 days. They may be frozen for up to several weeks (again, in an airtight container). Enjoy!