Chocolate eclairs! Heavy on the “chocolate” part.

This is a proportion for a very small portion - this usually yields around 8-10 eclairs. Some stuff with the dough (particularly the amount of eggs) might not scale in a straightforward manner, but they’re added one-by-one anyway.

The good thing about this recipe is that it’s really three recipes in a trench coat. You can eat the cream with a spoon. You can stuff the pastries with mushrooms. You can put the ganache on literally anything.

Cream/filling

Ingredients:

250 ml milk

1 egg yolk

40 g sugar

~ 2 tablespoons of starch

75 g dark chocolate (I use 70%)

10 g unsweetened cocoa powder

30 g butter

optionally, may add some vanillin/vanilla extract, but usually just good chocolate is enough

Preparation:

Melt the chocolate (preferably in a heated bath or a microwave) and leave it to cool.

Whip the egg yolk with sugar and starch. With a single egg yolk, whipping everything together can be hard; it’s best to first whip up the egg with the sugar and add starch bit by bit afterwards.

Boil the milk and pour some of it into the egg mixture, mix it together well, then pour everything back into the milk and keep stirring the mixture with a whisk as it cooks until it thickens. (Personally, I’ve never been able to cook it to the state of a, like, ball rather than very thick liquid, but that might be because I don’t use too much starch. Regardless, it’ll thicken further when it’s cooled and definitely won’t melt out of eclairs or anything).

Take the mixture off the heat and add the cooled chocolate, cocoa and butter, mix everything together.

Cover the cream with a plastic wrap so it’s in contact with the cream and put it into the fridge for at least 2 hours.

Dough

Ingredients:

50 ml milk

50 ml water

40 g butter

60 g flour (all-purpose)

2-3 eggs

A pinch of salt

Preparation:

Pour the milk and water in a pot, add salt and butter.

Boil the mixture, take it off the heat and add the flour (all at once).

Put it back on the heat for 1 minute and keep stirring the whole time with a spatula.

Take it off the heat again and let it cool down. Add one egg and carefully mix it in. Scramble the rest of the eggs together and add to the mixture bit by bit until the dough just becomes soft and plastic. (Be careful, if you add too much, you’ll have to start anew, if you add too little, the dough won’t keep its shape.).

Now starts the fun part - you need to form the little, like… sausages? worms? out of it onto a baking sheet. Put the dough in a pastry bag (best pick a sturdy one) and if you have a large (around 14 mm wide) star-shaped cap, you can use that, or you can just squeeze it straight out of the bag and later make grooves on top along the long side with a wet fork. The “perfect” eclairs are supposed to be around 14 mm x 14 cm, but honestly - who cares, they’ll be tasty either way. Make sure to leave sufficient space between the worms of dough, they’ll grow a lot.

Pre-heat the oven to 190 C/375 F and bake the worms for about 15 minutes before turning the heat down to 180 C/350 F and baking for another 15 minutes (depends on their size; it’s best to keep an eye on them and take them out when the outside turns golden).

Let them cool for a bit. You can make the ganache in the meantime.

Ganache

This one’s tricky because the exact proportions depend on the chocolate and cream you use. Regardless, if it turns out too thick you can always add a bit of unsweetened cocoa; if it turns out too thin, you can add some more cream

Ingredients:

50 g chocolate (again, I use 70%)

~1.5 tablespoons of sugar

~90 ml cream (this is for 33% cream)

A few slices of butter. Mostly to make the ganache more shiny.

Preparation:

Melt the chocolate and the sugar in the cream on low heat until the mixture is uniform (there is a specific moment where it gets Shiny, that’s what you’re looking for).

Take off the heat, mix in the butter and let it cool until it thickens.

Assembly

Once the eclairs have cooled down, you can stuff them with the filling. The cream used here is pretty thick and can’t really be piped into the eclairs, so I just slice the eclair open along one side and put the cream in with a spoon.

Once they’re full, dip the upper side of each eclair into the ganache. Put them in the fridge for a bit until the ganache fully stiffens - and that’s it!