Profiteroles with Cranberry Caramel Sauce and Maple Spiced Pecans

After holding tryouts for Thanksgiving dessert, I of course ended up going in a completely different direction than any of the contestants. Let me explain how this happened. Kurt claims to not have much of a sweet tooth, but there are three similar sweets that he really likes. Those are Boston cream pie, eclairs, and profiteroles. I’d made the first two at different times in the past, but I’d never made profiteroles even though we always order it when we see it on a restaurant dessert menu. I had various ideas about how to change up the classic components of a profiterole to make it a more seasonal, Thanksgiving kind of dessert, and Kurt voted down almost all of them. He insisted plain, vanilla ice cream and standard chocolate sauce was the only way to go. There would be no pumpkin or cinnamon ice cream or spiced pate a choux or nutmeg dusting on top or any such thing. But, there was a Cranberry Caramel Sauce that I absolutely had to try. It’s from the October/November issue of Garden and Gun, and it belongs with a Pumpkin Bread Pudding recipe from Austin’s own Jodi Elliott of Foreign and Domestic. So long as the ice cream remained nothing but vanilla and the pastry puffs weren’t messed up with any spices, Kurt was willing to try a sauce other than chocolate. Then, I went ahead and made the Maple Spiced Nuts from the bread pudding recipe as well. One last, little change from the classic preparation wouldn't hurt.

This dessert was made up of four parts, so I started by making the vanilla ice cream in advance to have one part completed and ready. I used the vanilla ice cream recipe from Eggs by Michel Roux which is nicely rich with six egg yolks and perfumed with seeds from a vanilla pod. Next, I made the puffs according to Ina Garten’s recipe in Barefoot in Paris. I like that she suggests pulsing the eggs into the pastry dough in a food processor rather than stirring and stirring by hand. That recipe is also available online. The great thing about choux pastry puffs is that you can refrigerate them or even freeze them, and then just re-warm them for a few minutes in the oven before serving. The tops will re-crisp and the airy insides will be as puffy as when they first came out of the oven. The third part of the dessert was the cranberry caramel sauce which was a simple matter of cooking sugar, water, and corn syrup until amber and then adding cranberries and pure cranberry juice. The berries and juice were stirred into the caramel and the mixture was brought back to a boil until the cranberries had all popped. Off the heat, salt and vanilla were added. After letting the sauce cool a bit, it was pureed in a blender, and then I strained it before letting it completely cool. Last but not least, the pecans were tossed with maple syrup, corn syrup, sugar, salt, and a mix of cumin, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cayenne. The nuts were baked until toasted through and allowed to cool before I chopped them.

The hint of spiciness and bit of salt in the nuts was perfect with the tart and sweet sauce. And, I think plain vanilla ice cream was the way to go here since it allowed the flavors in the toppings to shine. In the end, we were both completely happy with these changes to the traditional profiterole for Thanksgiving dessert, but I don’t think I’d get away with messing with the classic eclair.

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Practice Eclairs

I had made pate a choux, vanilla pastry cream, and chocolate glaze before, but I had never made them all at the same time in the form of an eclair. I decided it was high-time I do so, and I grabbed Wayne Harley Brachman’s Retro Desserts for a recipe to follow. I’ve had this book since it first came out in 2000, and it’s full of fun, well-known desserts with everything from cakes and pies to ice creams and candies. The book is described as bringing together kitsch desserts for today’s kitchens and letting you make your remembered favorites entirely from scratch. The cream-filled devil’s food cupcakes bring back Ho Ho’s. I’ve never had cherries jubilee, but it’s in the book too. I’ve made the banana pudding which was fantastic, and I’ve always wanted to try the banana peanut butter sandwich cake. Then, there’s the rocky road pizza pie and the white-chocolate grasshopper pie to try. I could go on and on, but I was explaining about the eclairs.

I’ve named this post Practice Eclairs because these were so far from perfect. In fact, they were so ugly only their mother could love them. When it came time to pipe the dough into eclair shapes, I rather failed at the task. They ended up too wide and too flat and didn’t puff up enough to make them look any better after baking. I also made a few minis which were kind of cute, and I would love to make an entire batch at that small size. The mini version is shown at the top of the post. Making the pate a choux was easy enough. I’ve made Ina Garten’s gourgeres, and her technique involves a food processor to incorporate the eggs. Brachman suggested using an electric mixer which also worked fine, and either method is much easier than stirring in each egg by hand. So, making pate a choux is no problem; piping it into appropriate shapes still needs work.

The vanilla pastry cream was also not a problem. I’ve followed the recipe in this book several times, and it always turns out great. For filling the eclairs, this recipe suggests slicing the top off each one, pulling out some of the interior dough, and spreading the pastry cream on the bottom piece. Then, the top pieces were dipped in the chocolate glaze and set aside to dry. Tops found bottoms, and they were done. Slicing the eclairs to fill them, instead of hollowing them with a skewer and then piping in the filling, seemed like cheating. I think it also contributed to their unsightliness. However, the look of them stopped mattering as soon as I tasted them.

Freshly made eclairs are a wonderful thing. The pastry cream made with a vanilla bean had incredible flavor, and the chocolate glaze with espresso was amazing. I want to try again and do a little better job of piping the dough into eclair shapes. And, I want to try some other recipes to compare and contrast and fill them without slicing, but deliciousness won out over ugliness with these for certain.


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