So. Much. Custard. Part 3
Iced Buns
FINALLY! The Iced Buns. Ellie and I changed this recipe a good bit because it calls for a yeast dough that you then fill with the fabulous creams and compotes. Gluten free yeast dough sucks. I’m sorry, it really does. All those people on the interwebs who say “I finally found a gluten free bread that tastes like the real thing!!” are lying. Or at best, only telling a partial truth. For some reason, gf yeast dough stales REALLY fast, like sometimes even the same day. So why use a dough that’s going to suck tomorrow? We made popovers instead!! This is the dough you make eclairs and cream puffs out of. So now you know how to do those too! Here’s the recipe:
Triple Oak Bakery Pâte à choux
Mix together in a small bowl:
1 cup TOB gluten free flour or other gf flour with no xanthan or guar gum included
1/2 tsp salt
Mix together in a heavy saucepan:
1 c water
1/2 c (1 stick) butter
Bring the water and butter to a hard boil, then dump in the flour mixture all at once and start stirring with a wooden spoon. Also, turn the burner down to low, but keep the pan on the stove
Keep vigorously stirring the dough until it forms one mass and feels almost like a super ball – very elastic and almost rubbery.
Transfer the dough to a stand mixer and start beating in whole eggs one at a time. Scrape the beater and bowl very thoroughly after each egg and beat each egg in on medium-low speed until the dough looks pretty homogenous.
After beating in the last egg, either pipe the dough out in blobs (cream puffs) or lines (eclairs) or divide it into 12 buttered muffin cups.
We decided to use the muffin cup method, but in retrospect, the buns would have been much easier to assemble and eat if we had piped them into eclairs. You can find directions for doing that all over the web, like here.
find the printable version at the bottom of the post!
Making the popover shells
These iced buns are two different flavors – a cardamom bun with almond cream filling, and a nutmeg bun with (in the case of the recipe) sour cherry filling. I don’t have sour cherries. But I do have peaches and apricot jam, so we cooked down chopped, peeled peaches in apricot jam for the fruit compote filling instead of the cherries. Yum:
Peach & Apricot Jam for the bun filling
To make the two doughs, we just divided the pâte à choux and added the recommend amount of cardamom to one batch and nutmeg to the other. But you don’t have to do that, or you can use different spices or whatever. I liked the dough with the spices in it though, it was a nice, if subtle, touch.
If you’re intimidated by baking, I would just pick one of the fillings, because there were a lot of parts to this thing. The almond filling was an almond custard lightened with whipped cream and the fruit filling had two elements: a compote/jam and a chantilly cream (sweet whipped cream). Both flavors got royal icing on top and the almond buns also got sliced almonds stuck to the royal icing. Other than the change of apricot/peach for sour cherry, we followed the filling and topping recipes as written. None of them are difficult and all of them will keep at least a day (chantilly) or four (custard and royal icing – put plastic wrap directly on the surface of both of these ingredients!) or indefinitely (jam). If you want to make the pâte à choux shells ahead, they freeze beautifully – just heat them in a 350F oven for 4-5 minutes to crisp them up before filling.
PHEW! This was a big post, I apologize, but I do love custards and I did have an awful lot of egg yolks to use up. I was poking around in my cookbooks while waiting for the caramel to brown and did come across a recipe for French Buttercream in my copy of Lenôtre’s pastry book. It uses 12 egg yolks for four cups of frosting. I could have just made that! But hey, it was really fun – I hope you enjoy it too, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions or need help!
French Buttercream uses a ton of egg yolks!
Cream Puff/Éclair Dough (pâte á choux)
I’m sure there are people out there who don’t like cream puffs but I don’t happen to know any of them. This was a staple at the bakery all year round and we made thousands of them, but I never got tired of eating them.
For a celiac, the joy of cream puff/éclair dough (more properly called pâte á choux) is that it’s not the gluten that does the heavy lifting – it’s a starch reaction! Even better, it’s a breeze to make and incredibly versatile. Sure, cream puffs and éclairs are awesome but so are gougères (their cheesy cousin), savory filled buns á la the 50’s luncheon staple Curried Chicken Puffs, and just about anything else you can think of.
This dough is all about consistency. When made with regular flour, it can be made a bit more slack, but for gluten free choux you need a good stiff dough especially if you’re piping them. If that sounds daunting, don’t be afraid because the window of acceptable consistency is quite large. If you’re worried, err on the side of too stiff rather than too loose or throw the rulebook out and make popovers in a muffin tin. The sky’s the limit with this fast and easy dough!
Ingredients
- 1 cup TOB gluten free flour or other gf flour with no xanthan or guar gum included
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 c water
- 1/2 c (1 stick) butter
- 3-4 whole large eggs
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400F|200C
- Line two trays with parchment, silicone or equivalent OR heavily grease a 12-hole traditional-sized muffin tin (2”x 1.25” cups)
- Mix together the gluten free flour and the salt in a small bowl and set by the stove.
- Over medium high heat, bring the water and butter to a strong boil in a medium saucepan until the butter has melted. Dump all the flour in at once and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon, turning the heat down to medium. Keep stirring until the flour is completely incorporated and forms a single mass that pulls away from the sides of the pan, is almost elastic or rubbery in texture and leaves a starchy film on the bottom of the pan. Immediately remove from heat. Put the dough into the bowl of a stand mixer or a bowl that you can use a hand mixer in and let it cool for 2-5 minutes, but it’s fine if the mixture is still hot/warm when you start beating the eggs in.
- With your stand mixer or hand beater on low speed, mix in the first egg until the dough is a uniform consistency and doesn’t look curdled or like scrambled eggs any more. Scrape the bowl and beater(s) very well, especially if you are using a stand mixer.
- One at a time, beat in two more eggs, completely incorporating them into the batter and scraping the bowl and beater(s) well every time. At this point you should have a very stiff batter that is immobile when you stop beating it.
- It will probably take another egg, but the consistency you want is when you stop the mixer, the batter just slumps down from the beater(s) a little bit but is in no way runny and is still very stiff. Beat the last egg in a small bowl and add it to the dough in thirds, stopping after incorporating each one to check the consistency.
- Divide the dough between the 12 heavily greased muffin cups and bake for about 40-45 minutes until the exterior is golden brown and the cracks in the shell are yellow to pale honey color.
- Remove them from the muffin tin and eat them hot with butter and jam. Be careful, the steam inside is very hot when you break them open! You can also cool them completely and fill with cream (pastry or whipped) and jam or a savory filling of your choice. Shrimp salad and curried chicken salad are classics.
- The easiest way to form puffs and éclairs is to use a piping bag with a ½”|1.25cm tip (or ziplock with the corner cut out), though for puffs you can also use two spoons. For puffs, hold the bag straight up and pipe gently onto the tray, then stop squeezing and finish off by swirling the tip around the top of the dough to make it smooth, spacing the puffs 1.5” apart. For éclairs, with the bag slanted, pipe consistent lines of dough 2-4”|5-1cm long and finish by pulling the tip back over the eclair to ‘cut’ the dough from the bag, also spacing them 1.5” apart.
- Bake them about 30-35 minutes (longer if they are 2” or more) until they are honey colored. The cracks should be golden and the shells should be noticeably light when you pick them up off the tray.
- Give them a minute to cool slightly then flip them over and poke a hole in the bottom (I use a piping tip) to let the steam out then let them cool completely. For best results with any size, don’t fill them until just before you are going to eat them, or no more than an hour or two before as most fillings will seep into the shell and make it a bit soggy.
- Baked and cooled buns, choux or éclair shells can be bagged and frozen. To thaw for filling, place them (frozen) on a tray and reheat in a 350F|175C oven for 4-6 minutes (or more, depending on size), until they are barely hot and the shell has crisped up. They will cool very quickly and should then be filled and served within an hour or two at most
