Description
Cream puffs are one of the loveliest and most popular desserts in Croatia. Learn how to make them!
Ingredients
Scale
For the pastry
- 1 cup (250 ml) eggs (this is about 4 eggs size S)
- 1 cup (250) ml water
- 1/2 cup (125 ml) vegetable or sunflower oil
- 1 1/8cup (150 g) all purpose flour
- pinch of salt
- 3 tsp sugar
For the filling
- 4 cups (1 l) milk
- 3 sachets vanilla sugar (or 3 tsp vanilla extract)
- 1 1/4 cup (250 g) sugar
- 1 egg
- 5 egg yolks
- 1 1/8 cup (150 g) cornstarch
- 4.2 oz (125 g) butter, softened, room temperature
- 1 cup (250 ml) whipping cream + some powdered sugar
- powdered sugar for dusting
Instructions
- Make the pastry: Combine water, oil, salt and sugar and heat until it boils. Remove from heat and add flour, all at once, stirring with wooden spoon until all the lumps are dissolved and it pulls away from sides of the pan (it will take about 2 minutes).
- Gradually add eggs, one by one and combine well after each addition, until the batter comes together. This is your pastry dough. It will be thick, shiny, smooth and sticky. Put it into a pastry bag with star tip or round plain tip and pipe it onto baking sheet lined with parchment paper, 1 inch apart. Make desired size mounts-I prefer their diameter to be 1.25 inch. Smooth pointy tops with a wet finger, so that they don’t burn while baking.
- Preheat oven to 395F (200C) and bake for 35-40 minutes. You can also bake them at 250 C for 12-14 minutes and then reduce temperature to 300F (150 C) and bake for 20 more minutes, so that the inside dries out thoroughly. Let cool completely and cut in half with serrated knife.
- Whisk egg with yolks, 100 ml milk and cornstarch-make sure there are no lumps.
- Heat the rest of milk with vanilla and sugar. When it boils, remove from heat and add to the egg mixture. Put on low heat and stir for several minutes until it thickens into a custard. Cover with plastic foil and let cool to room temperature.
- Mix butter with electric mixer. Take cooled custard and mix it as well. Then combine the two. Make sure to thoroughly incorporate butter into the custard.
- Mix whipping cream with some powdered sugar until soft peaks form.
- Assembling:
- Put the filling into a pastry bag with a star tip and pipe it on the bottom of each cream puff. Then pipe a layer of whipped cream and cover with tops you cut off earlier.
- Dust with powdered sugar. Keep in cool place.