Profiteroles

Before the onslaught of illness, we were supposed to have dinner with friends at their house. I planned to make profiteroles, which are pate a choux puffs filled with ice cream and then topped with some sort of chocolate sauce. I made them, and then they hung out in the freezer until we finally all got well enough to reschedule.

Gougères

I wasn't sure how my oven would deal with pate a choux. It's not well sealed, and loses heat all the time, and I was afraid it would lose the moisture created in the first half of the baking process. Thankfully, it didn't, and I got 20 puffs made without much fuss. I used the rest of the pate a choux batter to make gougères by mixing in shredded cheese and some mustard and scooping the batter onto a baking sheet. These were amazing and got consumed within a few hours. Yum.

The next step was making rose flavored ice cream, just like I did for class a year ago. A custard base, with rose water added, then that rested in the fridge for a day. After that I churned it in the ice cream maker and, while it was still soft, piped it into the puffs. I know this isn't the usual way to do this, but I thought it might be interesting to have them filled this way. It did work out, although I had to move quickly to keep from being covered in melty rose-flavored ice cream!

These then lived in the freezer in an airtight container until last night. To top them off, I made a saffron-white chocolate ganache, with 4 ounces of white chocolate, 4 ounces of cream, a little butter, and a generous pinch of saffron (added after the cream was heated, before being added to the chocolate). By the time we got to dessert the ganache was the perfect pouring consistency. I also brought chocolate fudge sauce because I wasn't sure how the kids would like the saffron. We ended up all trying both. I think the saffron ganache was the better choice!