Hello all! I am flying solo this week for our Bakealong Challenge/Food Friday. Kris has out-of-town company visiting and had a hectic week schedule to boot, so since I owe her bigtime for helping me out while I was down with strep-throat, I totally wanted to help her out and make her life easier this week and give her a break! She deserves it and deserves to have fun with her visitor! Thank you again Kris, you saved my behind the past couple weeks! Love you my friend!!! 

 

This week it’s the King Arthur Flour February Bakealong Challenge recipe! I know I have said this more times than I can count, but I truly do enjoy these challenges. And I say that because most of the time they truly are a challenge, getting me to make something I never have, plus things I’d never even thought to make! This month’s, the Dark Chocolate Eclairs are one such never-thought-to-make recipe. They were always something bought in the bakery – certainly not something I myself could make! Well, I am here to tell you that it is a VERY doable. I was so proud of myself for creating these little lovelies in my very own kitchen. The Dark Chocolate Eclairs Bakealong Walk-Through on KAF blog, makes it even easier to follow along!

The ingredients were simple, even if I had stuck with the original ones called for in the recipe, lol. I’d read a few of the reviews for this Challenge, and one stuck in my head that thought the filling was too bitter, so it was suggested to try using semi-sweet chocolate instead of the unsweetened chocolate. That’s what I did, and I just used the semi-sweet chocolate chips I had in my pantry. I also used my own Hershey’s Cocoa Powder I had, not the Dutch Processed – I am just recovering from being sick for 2 weeks with strep, and wanted to make it as simple on myself as I could! The only things that I had to purchase special for this recipe, were a couple of items I don’t always have around – whole milk and heavy cream. The whole milk is for the chocolate cream filling and the heavy cream is for the ganache – the chocolate glaze coating. Everything else, was on hand –  eggs, butter, flour, water, cornstarch, regular cocoa powder, light corn syrup and granulated sugar.

I did mine in stages as well (I’d read through the walk-through blog post for this and it’s stated it works well that way if you need it to!) – and this recipe is a champ for that sort of thing! I made the eclair shells and the pastry cream one day, then the day I was going to photograph them, I put them together and made the glaze. Let me just say that photographing them was harder than making them! LOL!

I had never made a pastry cream (in this case I kept thinking of it as homemade pudding, because that’s what it tasted like every time I had to taste, for quality control purposes you know, lol) and it was much easier than I thought! The eclair pastry I’d had experience with as it’s a pate a choux and that’s what we made as part of the Kringle in the December 2016 recipe challenge! I actually got to use a skill/technique again, and I felt pretty confident! I used a pastry bag with no tip, just a cut end, to pipe the eclair pastry batter/dough, and they even recommend using an ordinary ziptop bag with a hole cut in the corner – it was easy peasy either way! I also piped in my chocolate cream filling with a 1M Wilton tip for prettiness AND easiness. You could use the ziptop bag thing again for that, or spoon it in etc. For me, it was less-messy and faster to pipe it in, and the bonus effect of it being pretty, lol.

The glaze was very simple to make and a recipe/technique I was very familiar with, a simple ganache. I use ganache to make my homemade chocolate truffles, so it’s definitely something I’m really used to making, and honestly, even if it was the first time I’d ever made it, it’s a very simple thing to do! I drizzled my glaze on top of my put-together eclairs, just because I wanted to, lol. It was purely and personal choice, you can dip the cut tops in the glaze if you like.

All in all, this recipe was a lot of fun to make and I feel like I added another skill to my repertoire – I CAN make eclairs! Yay me!! And you can too!! Seriously! It does make a lot of shells, so I am going to make a 1/2 batch of the Vanilla Pastry Cream to use them up, I do have some chocolate left as well, but I really want to try my hand at the regular pastry cream – if I can nail that, I’ll never have to buy custard-filled-anything again, I can just make my own! LOL!!