For amateur pastry chefs looking for new interesting ideas, the recipe for the Eclair cake is offered. The “highlight” is that it does not consist of cakes, but is made in the form of a “profit ring”, let's call it that. Choux pastry lovers will love this.
Ingredients
For the test you need to prepare:
- 125 ml of water and milk;
- one teaspoon of salt and sugar;
- eggs in the amount of 4-5 pieces;
- flour - 150 grams;
- butter - 100 grams;
- almond petals for cake decorating.
To prepare the cream, you will need:
- 1 cup of milk (200 ml);
- 250 gr sugar (150 - in cream, 100 - for nuts);
- 1 egg
- 200 grams of butter;
- 0.5 cups of nuts;
- 1 tablespoon of flour, starch and vanilla sugar.
Cooking Choux Dough
To make the dough for the Eclair cake, you need to mix water with milk in a saucepan, add a dry mixture of salt, simple and vanilla sugar, and then butter. The resulting mass must be kept on the stove to a boil, making sure that the oil is completely melted. After this, add the flour and stir well immediately to avoid the appearance of lumps. Knead until the dough gathers in a "bun" and will lag behind the walls of the pan. Then the test should be allowed to rest and cool for about 10 minutes.
The following is the process of egg intervention. In the ingredients they are indicated in an amount of 4-5 pieces. Since the eggs can be of different sizes, they need to be driven into the dough one at a time, each time thoroughly mixing. After stirring the fourth, stop and carefully examine the consistency: use a spatula to lift part of the dough and tilt it. If it hangs from it in the shape of a triangle, the dough is ideal, but if it drains heavily or, conversely, does not move from a spoon, baking the Eclair cake may not rise and the hollow structure inside will not work.
The next step is to fill the pastry bag with dough. If there is no bag, you can make it out of baking paper by folding it with a cone and cutting off the tip. We place the dough on an oiled or parchment-covered form so that a high ring is obtained. For this you need to make at least three turns. It remains only to scatter the almond petals on top . This is how our future Eclair cake looks, before being sent to the oven, whose photos are presented in the review.
Baking
In the preparation of choux pastry, scrupulousness in the baking process is very important. Our task is to get a rose, browned cake with a void inside. To do this, preheat the oven to 250 degrees, then turn it off and send the custard rings there for 12 minutes. After them, turn on the oven and continue the baking process for half an hour at a temperature of 175 degrees. It is very important not to open the oven during operation. The readiness of the rings can be recognized by the browning edges. After turning off, the dough can be left in the oven to avoid falling.
Praline
Let's start by turning on the stove and pouring nuts with sugar into the pan. Stirring the mixture all the time, we wait for the melting of sugar and caramelization of nuts and immediately remove from heat. If the moment is missed and the sugar burns, the pralines will be bitterness, but we do not need this at all. After the nuts must be laid out on parchment for cooling.
Cream
To prepare the "inside" of the Eclair cake, first you need to mix milk and vanilla sugar and bring to a boil. In a separate bowl, thoroughly stir the eggs beaten with sugar and starch with flour to get rid of lumps. Then carefully add part of the milk to the egg mixture, stirring (so that the eggs do not curl), and pour the resulting mass into a container with the rest of the milk. The cream is brought to a thickening, stirring constantly, and set aside to cool off the stove.
The cooled cream must be whipped with a mixer with softened butter and crushed pralines on a blender to a white lush consistency.
Assembling the Eclair Cake
Collecting our cake is very simple. Having cut the custard rings along, it is necessary to grease the lower part with plenty of cream and cover with the upper "half ring". Sprinkle with powdered sugar on top, if desired, can be decorated with chocolate. You can also include imagination and decorate the cake with fruits and berries.
Eclair cake without baking
Pampering yourself and your loved ones with homemade cake is very tempting. But not everyone has the time and outstanding culinary skills. Especially when it comes to such a cake: kneading and correctly baking choux pastry is a rather laborious task for beginners in the confectionery business. In this case, a cake recipe is useful, which does not need to be baked and is not difficult to make. Of course, he has nothing to do with the classic eclair, but the people got this name, probably due to a similar filling.
So, we need: shortbread cookies, half a liter of milk, two tablespoons (with a hill) of corn starch, 3 - sugar, 1 egg yolk and a pinch of vanillin.
The first step is to cook the cream, for which half of the milk is boiled, and with the second mix the starch with sugar, yolk and vanilla. Send the mixture to hot milk and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring all the time, until it thickens. The resulting pudding should be covered with a film and set to cool in a cold place.
In the next step, take a suitable cake mold and cover it with foil. Further, the process is extremely simple: you need to lay out the cookies along the perimeter of the form, distribute the pudding layer on top and continue to alternate the layers in the same way, but so that the cookie is the top layer.
It remains to cover the cake with icing, for which you need to boil a mass of four tablespoons of sugar on the stove, one - milk and two teaspoons of cocoa. When it boils, add butter and stir until it dissolves.
We put our cake “Eclair” for impregnation for 12 hours in the refrigerator. Upon their expiration, the delicate aromatic yummy is ready for tea.