Swans

Cream puffs are one of my sister’s favourite treats so I decided to make a more special version of them for her birthday in lieu of a cake.

Using this pâte à choux recipe, the heads and bodies are piped and baked. The instructions for piping/shaping are clear but I did find drawing the swan’s beak out with a toothpick worked better for me. I used all of the tips mentioned (chilling the dough, misting piped dough with water) and followed the baking instructions and times given for a conventional oven and they worked perfectly – though I had a moment of panic when all of the head/necks deflated when I opened the oven door to turn them over (they did re-inflate) – resulting in crisp pastries with dry, hollow interiors…..perfect for filling.

The filling is a light, silky, ethereal blend of pastry cream and Italian meringue buttercream topped with lightly sweetened vanilla whipped cream…..I find the book’s versions of these recipes too complicated and/or sweet so used this vanilla pastry cream and this vanilla buttercream instead.

The recipe says it makes 8 swans but mentions that there will be leftover batter; it’s actually enough to make another 8 swans….so I did. There’s enough of the pastry cream/buttercream mixture to fill all 16 birds if you don’t mound it too high but I did need a double batch of the whipped cream.

My sister loved them, as did the rest of the family. Like most of the recipes in this book, they aren’t difficult to make but they’ve been relegated to very special occasions only as they are very time consuming.