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Hi, and welcome back to Keep Calm And Bake. I am Caroline and I have my own YouTube cooking
channel but today I am going to teach you how to make eclairs.
[music]
Now who doesn't like a good eclair. I am going to show you how to make a simple shoe pastry.
It is actually quite easy once you are going to know how. You are going to do this in a
couple of different stages. So, first we are going to make shoe pastry and then we are
going to bake them, fill them then smother them with chocolate. To make your shoe pastry
you just need a few ingredients butter, sugar, water, flour and eggs.
First of you need to heat your butter. Add together with the water and the sugar in a
pan and bring these up to a boil. Once it is boiling take it off the heat and chuck
in all the flour and beat it with a wooden spoon until it forms a lovely ball of dough.
Now the reason you have to leave it to cool down a little bit before you add the eggs
in is that if it is too hot your eggs are just going to scramble and you don't want
that. So, now mine has been left for a good 5 minutes. I am going to crack 1 egg in. I
am going to beat it again until all the egg is absorbed and you will see that the mixture
starts to go lovely and glossy. Just crack one in. Just do one at a time as well. There
is a lot of beating involved in this bit. OK. So, make sure that once it is fully mixed
in. OK. Now the next one, fair amount of elbow grease will be worth it. Yeah. OK. Just going
to slowly...try not to make a big amount of mess like me. Good. We are just going to keep
beating this until you see a bit of a shine. You want to have a bit of the gloss.
Now what you have to do is pop it into a piping bag and we are just going to pipe some long
éclair shapes onto a baking sheet and bake them. OK. One thing I am going to do before
piping. I am actually just going to sprinkle some water. Just going to sprinkle it around
on the baking sheet and the reason I am doing this is that once they go into the hot oven,
basically it acts like steam and it helps the pastry to rise and puff up. OK. Now I
am just going to pipe some long shapes onto here. Alright, how big do you want them. You
can make them as big as you like. So keep piping your eclairs until all the shoe pastry
is used up.
So, these are ready to go into the oven. Mine is preheated at 200 degrees C. We will put
the other conversions on the recipe for you and they take about 18 to 20 minutes. So just
until they are puffed up and golden and brown.
Great so while there is a baking. You can get on and make your chocolate sauce. Pop
your water and then your sugar into your sauce pan. Now pop it onto the heat and bring it
up to the boil. Reduce down to shimmer and leave it for a couple of minutes until it
becomes a little bit thicker. Break all your chocolate pieces into a large bowl. Pour the
sugar syrup into the chocolate and just keep stirring until you get a lovely thick rich
sauce. So, there you go éclairs are out. They are nice and golden. Now if you under
cook these then they are going to deflate and sink. OK. So, what I am going to do now
is just poke a hole and turn them around. Poke a hole in the bottom. We can even draw
a little slit or something like that and this just releases the air from the inside of the
eclairs and I have just turned the oven off. What I will do now is just pop it back into
the oven with the door open. A little bit. It's not too hot and leave them back in the
oven. Just to dry out the inside a bit.
[music] So, oh look at this bowl of beautifully melted
chocolate sauce. Hmmm I want to eat this but I am not going to, no. I am going to make
the eclairs. So, the eclairs pastry shells have cooled down. I have whipped cream at
the ready and in my whipped cream, this is double cream, I put just like a table spoon
of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla. I am going to pop the whipped cream into my piping bag.
I am just going to start filling up the insides of the pastry. All this cream looks ready.
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Whipped cream, squeeze it all the way down. Now this we will put to one side. To fill
up the eclairs, this is the fun part, what you do is make a hole at one end of the éclair
using a knife. Just a little hole. You basically want the nozzle to fit inside this hole and
then we are going to squeeze the cream in. OK. You got to be quiet...just pick it up.
Nozzle going in and then just squeeze. Oh! Might pop out a little bit. If the éclair
did not completely rise all the way through then you can just go at the other end. As
long as it has got enough cream on the inside...everyone will be happy.
So there we go. That one is done. So just continue doing this until you have filled
up all your eclairs then we smother them with chocolate. So, now these are all filled. Final
bit is to just put a lovely layer of chocolate across these. Now you can use a piping bag
or you can use a teaspoon whatever you fancy. I am going with the teaspoon. A nice good,
big layer of that smother down and then I should just leave these to set for a little
bit. Wait for the chocolate just to go a little bit harder. You can pop them in the fridge
and bring them out whenever you are ready to eat them.
Smells good. I hope you all really enjoy making these eclairs. And do let me know...leave
us your comments. I would love hearing from you and also let me know what type of fillings
you can pipe in here because there are so many different types. You can pipe the custard,
whatever you fancy. So have fun, I will see you soon.