choux puffs and a croquembouche

Choux pastry was my nemesis for a year or so. I’d made it twice, both times failing miserably, as all I seemed to be able to produce was sad, flat lumps of not-quite-pastry. I’m not sure how I managed to screw it up so badly, considering the first time I used the choux pastry recipe from the Sprinklebakes cookbook it was a raging success, can Heather Baird do no wrong?

I made choux puffs a few weeks ago without a hiccup, until I tried to make pastry cream and it was so delicious but also very runny. I then made a croquembouche.

 

baked churros

I am a proud visitor of the yearly National Folk Festival in Canberra, where my family and I have spent every Easter for over a decade. The music is awesome and perfectly folky and each year we return home with a couple of new CDs. The highlight of the festival used to be the daily churros I would have, dipped in rich Italian hot chocolate. Until the churro stalls stopped coming.

 

I have always been a lover of all things doughnutty, however I can’t stand frying, I’ve fried churros a few times before and always end up with a few minor burns, dough all over my hands and a plate of tasty yet too-greasy churros. When I came across this baked version in my frequent trawling of the Sprinklebakes blog, I knew I had hit the Spanish jackpot, particularly since I was planning a Mexican themed 18^th birthday dinner (churros are Spanish, close enough?). My friends devoured them, perhaps because I am unusually pushy when trying to get people to eat my food and I peer pressured them into it, but the general consensus was that they were delicious.