Not worth it

Choux paste is totally not worth it. I should have listened to Crystal.

To make choux paste, you start out with a boiling mixture of milk, water, butter, sugar, and salt. Then you add a bunch of flour all at once and "stir vigorously." It turns out that you need substantial core strength to stir this stuff.

Then, while it's still hot, you scrape the dough into a bowl and start mixing eggs one at a time. All I can say is thank god for my stand mixer because my arms were too tired to stir by hand anymore at that point. By the time you get to the fifth and sixth egg, the dough is nasty and viscous and sticky. But it looked just like in the book, so I guess I did it right.

I attempted to put the dough in a pastry bag with a spatula, but I think most of it ended up elsewhere. Namely on me and the counter tops. And the floors. And the dogs. And the oven door. And who knows where else? But enough made it into the bag for me to squeeze out A LOT of fancy little quarter-sized blob things.


I brushed them with a beaten egg and then popped them in the oven for a half-hour. By the time they came out, I had still not finished cleaning up the sticky dough from the rest of the kitchen. In fact, although I made these on Sunday night, I'm still finding bits of dough here and there.

The puffs turned out beautifully. They were shiny and puffy and hollow in the center, just like they were supposed to be. But they didn't taste very good. They didn't taste bad, just not good. They were chewy and bland and, well, not tasty. I had made some vanilla and chocolate pudding to fill them with, but in the end, I decided that the pudding tasted better by itself (or at least with some Nilla wafers and bananas), so I ended up using the puffs as dog treats for a couple of days and then dumping them.

But at least I remembered how good Jello Instant Pudding is!

The next recipe is supposed to be meringue, but the book says to not even try it in humid weather, so I guess I'll do that one right after I move to another city. So next? Genoise. What is that, you ask? I have no idea. I'll figure it out this weekend.