Chinese Recipes | Cooking Tips | Good Eats

Tag:Choux Pastry Puffs, Dessert, easy dessert recipe

For a cook who hardly bakes, this is probably another idiot-proof recipe that cannot go wrong. Some other idiot-proof baking recipes include my friend, Angela’s crunchy raisin cookies, and Rasa Malaysia’s Portuguese Egg Tarts.

I decided to give this Choux (pronounced as “shoo”) Pastry Puffs a shot after reading about it in The Baker Who Cooks. The recipe looks so wonderfully simple and her Choux Pastry Puffs turned out so pretty.

However, my paste mixture of flour, milk, butter, eggs, a bit of salt and water did not turn out as shiny as hers. (That’s why she is the baker who cooks and I am the cook who hardly bakes.)

I also do not have the basic equipment like pastry tips and pastry bags to pipe the choux paste onto the baking tray, so I improvised by using a small ziploc bag as my pastry bag, and nipped off a corner for the choux paste to be squeezed out. (No pictures for that as it looked a bit messy :p)

After piping, smooth out the tips with a finger dipped in cold water, so that the tip will not burn in the oven. (Picture below was before the smoothing)

I was pretty satisfied with how my Choux Pastry Puffs turned out. I managed to make about 20 medium 1.5″ puffs from half the ingredient measurements from the original recipe.

After cooking, the choux pastry formed a crisp shell with a moist lining and hollow center making it ideal for filling with both sweet and savory delights. They make wonderful finger food.

Choux Pastry Puffs Recipe
from “Joy of Cooking - All About Party Foods & Drinks”

Ingredients (yields about 2.5 cups choux paste):

- 1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/2 cup whole milk
- 8 tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 4 large eggs

Method:
1. Bring the water, milk, butter and salt to a boil over medium heat.

2. Add the flour all at once and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan. Continue to cook and stir the mixture for about 1 minute, to eliminate excess moisture. Allow to cool for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Beat in eggs one at a time, by hand, with a wooden spoon or on low speed with a mixer. Make sure paste is smooth before adding each egg. Beat the dough till smooth and shiny. Pipe paste onto pan according to desired size.

4. Preheat oven to 400degF. Bake for 15 mins then reduce the oven temperature to 350degF and continue to bake until golden brown and very firm to the touch, which will take about 10-15 mins more. Serve warm.

Note: Choux paste can be covered and refrigerated for up to 4 hours. When it is cold, you do not need to bring the paste to room temperature before baking.

I did not have a custard filling recipe, so I used a Vanilla Cream Filling Recipe. If you are making the Choux Pastry Puff according to the above recipe ingredient measurements, according to The Baker Who Cooks, she made 66 small (about 1.5″ in diameter) puffs from it, then the vanilla cream filling ingredient measurements below will be just enough.

Vanilla Cream Filling Recipe:

- 6 tbsp sugar
- 2 tbsp cornstarch
- 1 cup milk
- 2 beaten egg yolks
- 1 tbsp butter
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1. In a pan, combine sugar, starch, and gradually add milk, stirring constantly.

2. Cook and stir over medium heat until the filling becomes very thick and begins to bubble.

3. Remove from heat and slowly pour egg yolks into pan and stirring constantly. Cook and stir mixture over low heat.

4. Add in butter and vanilla extract. Transfer filling to a bowl and set aside.

Lessons learnt:

1. I am supposed to hold the piping bag with the tip at a 90 degree angle to the baking sheet and just pipe the choux paste straight down instead of making twirls. This is because by making twirls, I got some holes at the base of the pastry puffs and fluid fillings will ‘leak’.

2. The pastry puffs will expand when baked, so remember to leave about 2 inches gap between the piped paste. I didn’t do that, but thankfully the baked puffs did not stick together.

3. Read the recipe book if you have it! I actually bought the book (Joy of Cooking - All About Party Foods) after the Choux Pastry Puffs post by The Baker Who Cooks, but I did not refer to it when I made this. Doh! There are more tips in the book.

4. The vanilla cream filling was too liquid (that’s why I drizzled some over the top of the Choux Pastry Puffs). Perhaps I could cook it a bit more or as Rasa Malaysia advised, to add more cornstarch.

On the whole, *pat on my back* my Choux Pastry Puffs with Vanilla Cream Filling tasted quite good. :) It wasn’t too sweet or buttery so it was very easy to eat one after another. Easily. :D

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Tag:Dessert, make pastry dough, Portuguese Egg Tarts

Eat Portuguese Egg Tarts and lose 40 pounds in 2 months!

As Tigerfish pointed out, this Google Ad has been appearing in Rasa Malaysia’s website for the longest time. Eat her food and lose 40 pounds. Woohoo!

So I decided to make Rasa Malaysia’s famous Portuguese Egg Tarts.

I halved all the ingredient measurements cos I only made six, since this is my first attempt. You will notice I have many ‘first attempts’ here in my food blog. I am interested to try out new recipes, especially for food that is familiar to me. This is my new hobby.

Tigerfish, have you made yours yet? I know BuddingCook already made her Portuguese Egg Tarts for a Christmas party. And yes, this recipe is easy to follow and definitely a keeper.

Ok. Enough advertisement and pimping for Rasa Malaysia, just in case she floats to cloud nine and decides to stay there.

I realized I didn’t strain the filling through a strainer after beating the egg, which probably resulted in the little white bits on the custard mixture.

The Betty Crocker Pie Crust Mix has a crumbly flaky type of texture. The buttery taste was delightful! The kitchen and living room were filled with the sweet aroma of pastry when the tarts were almost done.

My new recipe attempts usually need to go through stringent QA testing before I let J eat them. So, two Portuguese Egg Tarts went to QA leaving me four to share with J.

For those of you who like to make pastry dough from scratch, here are a few pointers that I have gotten based on my research:

1. Baking is a science. Measure your ingredients carefully as too much flour makes a tough pastry; too much liquid gives a soggy dough; too much vegetable shortening / lard makes the dough greasy and crumbly.

2. To get a flaky, tender crust, handle the dough lightly by mixing the ingredients gently with a spatula. Kneading will cause excessive production of gluten which will make the pastry chewy and bread-like instead of light and flaky.

3. When handling dough, use your fingers instead of the palm of your hands as the fingers emit less heat than the palms.

4. When breaking down the butter or fats (vegetable shortening / lard), it’s ok to leave them in firm separate pieces, some fine and like crumbs, others the size of peas.

5. Water is used to bind the dough. As a rule of thumb, the flour, fat mixture should be moistened only to the point where it can form small balls that hold together when pressed with your fingers.

6. When rolling pastry dough, use a cool surface like a marble slab or a clean smooth countertop (I’ll line the counter top with plastic wrap and scatter some flour). DO NOT roll dough next to an oven or in a hot kitchen spot as this will cause the fats to melt.

7. If the dough becomes too soft during the rolling process, gently remove it from the work surface, slide a baking sheet below it and refrigerate it until it firms up.

I am going to make the second batch of this Portuguese Egg Tarts soon, using the remaining half packet of Betty Crocker Pie Crust Mix (I’ll make dough from scratch another day). I really think I can eat Portuguese Egg Tarts and lose 40 pounds in 2 months. Will you make them too?

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Tag:Dessert, junk food, krispy kreme doughnut

Have you ever tasted a hot Original Glazed Krispy Kreme Doughnut? The originals are the best. They are light and fluffy and small enough such that you wouldn’t feel like you got a sugar overdose. The glazed icing on the doughnuts were a tad too sweet for my friend’s WH’s liking, but it was ok for me.

This is another sinfully delicious food that I really shouldn’t be eating too much.

Here’s the deal:
Fitness experts say that if you are in a fitness program and watching your diet, you are allowed to have one day a week (”sin day”) to eat whatever you want. The rationale is that with that, you will not start craving for junk food and go on a food binge. Of course you do not go and gorge yourself silly with junk food. You eat sensible portions of sinful stuff like a chocolate cake or a hot Original Glazed Krispy Kreme Doughnut!

The price I paid:
A single Original Glazed Krispy Kreme Doughnut can set you back by 200 calories, of which 100 calories come from fats alone.

To walk off 100 calories, I need to brisk walk on the treadmill for 100 minutes. Of course, who can just eat one doughnut alone right? C’mon! It’s THE Original Glazed Krispy Kreme Doughnut! So I ate two, but I did not walk for 200 minutes. Instead I went to the local grocery store to buy more food.

Deal or no deal:
No deal! I am not in a fitness program… so I do not need to stick to that one-sin-day-a-week timetable. I also had two doughnuts each day for three days in a row! I’ll detox next year. Oops that’s tomorrow!

Happy New Year everybody!

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