Inspired by my excessive pastry consumption, I decided to learn to make some. So, I took a class on choux pastry in Paris. On the agenda for the three hour course? Just a few things – eclair au citron meringué (like a delicious lemon meringue pie), Paris-Brest (hazelnut goodness), choux with craquelin and pastry cream fillings, grougeres, and savory eclairs.

We made the dough first, which is not too difficult. Heat butter, milk, salt, and sugar, boil it, remove from heat, add flour, stir until it forms a ball. Beat in some eggs. Easy (well, we will see how easy it is when I try it without an assist from a professional chef). Then you pipe the dough into whichever shapes you want. Very fun! Same dough is used for all the goodies.

Before baking, we made craquelin to top the grougeres and eclairs. Craquelin is a “dough” that is put on top of choux, giving it a nice crunchy texture, and also helps the choux maintain a round shape when it bakes. We made a sweet craquelin (just butter, sugar, flour), and a savory one with hot pepper in it. Tasty. Then we put it all in the oven.

The savory treats were done first and we took a short break to fill them with Bousin cheese and eat all of them. I hadn’t had Boursin cheese for a long time, and that was a mistake because it is really delicious.

• 

• 

For the sweet choux, we made three flavors of pastry cream – lemon, vanilla, and praline (hazelnut). We also made chocolate diplomat cream for the cream puffs, and Italian meringue to top the eclairs. Piping all the pastry cream and meringue was fun. Especially fun was blow torching the meringue.

Below are the finished sweets. Clockwise from the top: Paris-Brest, cream puffs (you can easily see the texture of the craquelin on top), chouquette, lemon meringue eclair, chocolate meringue eclair.

The class was at La Cuisine Paris, which I highly recommend. I took a croissant class here last time we were in Paris and loved it. The two instructors I had are professional pastry chefs who have worked for famous pastry chefs, like Pierre Herme. La Cuisine also does food tours. Haven’t been on one, but betting they are fun.

After class I was, of course, excited to keep eating choux. I wanted more chouquettes, because I hadn’t tried any in the wild yet and they are covered in delicious pearl sugar. Pearl sugar has a nice crunchy texture, and its pretty rare to see it in the U.S for some incomprehensible reason. Pro tip – when you order chouquettes, you order by grams. Just say you want 100 grams.

And a Religieuse! These little nuns are so cute, and filled with mocha! Or chocolate. This one’s mocha.

At last, this is my final French pastry post. Unless we go back to France. Then I’ll write more. Promise.