A lighning of green tea : matcha éclairs

Des éclairs au thé matcha. A flash of light in the middle of rainy season. Un éclair is a lightning during a storm. And this dessert…

Green tea version.

Same crust as the petits choux (recipe here), but longer.

The filling is very Japanese at the base with matcha (green tea for ceremony) and shiro an (paste made of white beans and sugar), with gives a matcha an (green tea cream).

About this paste.

… I creamed it with coconut cream, and added a little brandy for flavor. They look rustic as it’s a week-day snack so I didn’t smoothen my cream with the sieve and I didn’t pipe the dough. Do that for guests !

On top, sugar and matcha green tea.

They call me ‘shoe cream’… Puff cake blues.

Les choux à la crème are probably the most successful French cake in Japan. Chou was easy to pronounce, but à la crème was too long. Everybody knew that meant cream. So the name became シュークリーム shu-kuri-mu chou cream, which is also how they say “shoe cream”.

Well we can see them everywhere from the luxury hotel tea room to the discount kombini (convenience store). They can be extraordinary, great, good, meh, abominable. The choice is huge. Some stands prepare them fresh all day.
I still find home-made fresher.

First let’s make the little choux. Then a cream at local taste including anko (azuki bean sweet paste) an ingredient borrowed from wagashi (Japanese tea sweets).

Simple, 125 g of water, 25 g of oil, 80 g of flour. I included about 2 eggs, a little vanilla extract and sugar.

Baked at 200 degrees, 25 minutes.

I really love the inside still wet. So I don’t fill them, I keep the cream on the side.

I passed boiled azuki beans through a sieve to get the creamy texture, added sugar and a little brandy. That’s koshian (‘passed’ bean paste, recipe here). More about it here.

The whip (here veg’) plus anko bean paste mix. It is very popular now.

Cygne et choux, puffy swan

Cygne is the name of this cake, it’s swan in French. I need to precise as mine could be a turkey as well… It’s kitsch like an after-school salon de thé visit with granny. They were proposing those when I was a kid…

Kat of The Bobwhites was our August 2012 Daring Baker hostess who inspired us to have fun in creating pate a choux shapes, filled with crème patisserie or Chantilly cream. We were encouraged to create swans or any shape we wanted and to go crazy with filling flavors allowing our creativity to go wild!

BTW, I’ve opened a Daring Baker Pinterest Board. Mostly my posts now, but I’ll add others’ progressively.

So, let’s go, mon chou. The recipe is already here (click on text) :

flockenshane

Well, the puffs. Very simple, I eyeball ingredients : water, oil, flour, eggs… a little salt, sugar, vanilla. I shape with the hands like a kid with playdo. So that doesn’t look pro.

I garnished them with Chantilly, vanilla flavored whipped cream (veg’ version), slightly colored in red.

Decorated with sugar.

Variations…

La religieuse… de Pise. Pisa tower style…

The bad gag is those jewel sugar lose their color on the cream…

Carnival doughnuts : orange blossom farting nuns

This is the season of Carnival in Europe. The tradition is to make all sorts of beignets (doughnuts).
The pets de nonnes are very popular home-made treats in France.
Pets de nonne literally means “farts of a nun”.

Because this looks like a nun’s veil. And the sainte woman can “prout prout” into the oil :

Even if actually most people use a spoon and gets this round shape.

That’s a pâte à choux(same dough as cream puff). I made it, this time, with olive oil and water instead of milk and butter, but don’t worry, that doesn’t make them healthy at all. They are flavored with orange blossom water and cane sugar and the olive oil, the trio is great.

When fried, they double of volume.

So they are very light, fluffy, full of air :

They are delicious hot or room temperature, with or without sugar on top. And that’s addictive, if you eat one, you eat them all. And you become phaaaat like a pig, but that doesn’t matter because you’re going to Lent till your so skinny that you need an emergency refueling of chocolate. Well, whatever your religious practice : enjoy the Carnaval Mardi-Gras !