Cream Puffs with Crackle and Cream | Baking with Dorie

The recipe of cream puffs with crackle and cream contains the classic and noteworthy dough and the filling. In our house, we’re obsessed with the pâte à choux, aka as the cream puff dough. Over the years, it has become something special to us. Awhile back, my daughter was inspired and must have made hundreds of these — in order to build an Eiffel Tower of puffs, called croquembouche. It was intended for my birthday. (The number of cream puffs corresponded to my age at the time.) Quite an epic undertaking, I must say!

If that’s not enough, a good friend of mine showed me a picture of an even grander, ginormous and stunningly decorated croquembouche at her wedding engagement in Paris. Oh la la!

There are a few interesting tidbits Dorie mentions about the dough. First, pâte à choux or the cream puff dough can be frozen after they are shaped, and baked straight from the freezer. Second, pâte à choux is equally good for sweet and salty applications. Third, it is the only dough that is both cooked and baked.

For the cooked part, you heat milk, water, butter, sugar (optional) and salt together until the butter melts, then add the flour all at once and cook that. Next, you beat in eggs. That’s the dough basic — a recipe that might be five centuries old.

Dorie Greenspan in Baking with Dorie

With all that history, I can’t help but feel the weight in making these cream puffs the best I possibly can. It’s reassuring when Dorie says that the pâte à choux dough recipe here is one she has fiddled with for years. She stopped tweaking after she discovered that the addition of an egg white was the secret. As a result, this recipe is deemed to be the gold standard.

This is what I’ve found: the dough is sturdy enough to hold the shape and light enough to puff. Again, Dorie delivers. The puffs come out superbly, firm and airy, the best I’ve ever baked them. To top them off, the brown sugar crackly cookie dough, called craquelin, crowns the puffs. The crunch together with the distinctive look of the crackle elevates the puffs to a whole new level. The recipe may take time, but it’s certainly worthy to make and to repeat.