Chocolate and Strawberry Eclairs (Photo Post)

This post is a bit late, but every Valentine's Day I tend to make something either pink or strawberry-themed, and this year I decided to go with eclairs! I'd never made any type of choux pastry before, and did fumble a bit from not having the right equipment (a good pastry bag and piping tips would have been a huge improvement!), but luckily these still turned out pretty well!

I won't duplicate the recipe here, but I used the eclair guide by The Flavor Bender. It's such a comprehensive tutorial that I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in making eclairs for the first time! Reading through the types of issues that could arise made the actual process a lot easier for me, since making choux pastry depends a lot on knowing how the batter is supposed to look and feel at each stage.

If I were to do this again, I think I would leave the shells in the oven for 5-10 more minutes. I took them out because I was already 20 minutes or so over the recommended baking time, but I think they could have gone even darker to have more structural integrity, which would have made filling them a bit easier.

(Also, I didn't use any type of guides/measurements when piping these... which I think you can pretty easily tell! If regularity is a priority, a template or measuring stick would go a long way :)

I made the standard chocolate ones according to the recipe, but decided to make half of mine strawberry flavored. To do this, I ground up freeze-dried strawberries and added some to both the pastry cream and the chocolate glaze, using white chocolate for the strawberry glaze instead of semisweet. (I used this vanilla pastry cream recipe as the foundation, by the way.) 

I didn't measure the strawberry powder for either component, but I would estimate that about the same amount, around 3-4 tbsp, was added to both the pastry cream and the glaze. 

My chocolate glaze could have been smoother if I had added a bit more cream, I think, but I ended up rushing the dipping stage a bit to try to catch the last of the daylight! Still delicious all the same.

This was definitely a time-consuming two-day process, but I'm glad I can officially say that I've demystified the choux process for myself! It's a lot less intimidating than I originally thought. For ease of piping, though, I have to say that the relative simplicity of profiteroles may sway me before I make eclairs again... both delicious options though!