Profiteroles

Round choux buns, filled with sweetened whipped cream, covered in a chocolate cream and piled into a mound. It is a birthday and Sunday dessert, it is bought from the pasticceria as often as it is made, and made at home it is two easy things around one difficult one.

The difficult one is the choux. It rises on steam alone, which is why the oven door stays shut and why the buns collapse the moment it does not.

Ingredients

Makes about 30 buns.

Choux

	Metric	Imperial
Water	250 ml	8.5 fl oz
Butter	100 g	3.5 oz
Plain flour	150 g	5.5 oz
Eggs	4, roughly	4, roughly
Salt	a pinch	a pinch

Filling

	Metric	Imperial
Double cream, very cold	500 ml	17 fl oz
Icing sugar	50 g	1.75 oz
Vanilla	to taste	to taste

Chocolate covering

	Metric	Imperial
Dark chocolate, 55 to 60 per cent	200 g	7 oz
Double cream	250 ml	8.5 fl oz
Butter	20 g	0.75 oz

The cream has to be cold and so does the bowl. Warm cream whips to a grainy mess and then to butter, and there is no way back from either.

Method

1. Bring water, butter and salt to a full boil. Take it off the heat, tip in all the flour at once, and beat to a smooth paste.
2. Return to medium heat and dry the paste out, stirring, two to three minutes, until it films the base of the pan.
3. Cool it to warm, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Stop when it drops from the spoon in a thick V. This may take three eggs or five; the recipe is a guide and the texture is the instruction.
4. Pipe walnut-sized rounds well apart. Flatten any peaks with a wet finger.
5. Bake at 200C, 400F, for 15 minutes, then without opening the door drop to 175C, 350F, for another 15 to 20 until deeply golden.
6. Pierce each bun in the base as it comes out, and let them cool completely on a rack.
7. Whip the cream with the sugar to soft peaks and pipe it in through the hole.
8. Melt the chocolate with the cream over a low heat, stir in the butter, and let it cool until it coats a spoon and pours slowly.
9. Dip or spoon it over the buns and stack them into a mound. Chill an hour.

What goes wrong

They rise then collapse. The oven door was opened, or they came out too pale. Underbaked choux has not set its walls and falls as it cools; take them further than looks necessary.

They stay flat. Too much egg, so the paste was too slack to hold steam. This is why the last egg goes in by eye.

They are soggy inside. Not pierced, so the steam stayed in. Pierce them the moment they leave the oven.

The chocolate sets hard and cracks. Too little cream, or it was poured on too cold. It should be glossy and just pourable, and it stays soft in the fridge.

The cream weeps out overnight. Whipped too loosely, or filled too far ahead. Fill them the day you eat them.

Why it works

There is no raising agent in choux at all. The water in the paste turns to steam, the steam inflates the dough while the starch is still soft, and the egg protein then sets around the cavity. Everything about the method serves that sequence: the initial high heat makes the steam, and the lower second stage dries and fixes the shell before the steam escapes.

The chocolate covering is a ganache, which is an emulsion of fat and water held together by the cocoa solids. That is why it stays glossy and soft rather than setting to a brittle shell the way melted chocolate alone would.

What an Italian would say

That they are round, that the chocolate goes over the top, and that the panna goes inside. That a mound of them in the middle of the table is the point, and that a plate of three arranged with a mint leaf is a restaurant being clever. And that they are a dessert you are allowed to buy.