Hazelnut and Vanilla Cream Puffs
Confession: these cream puffs are more complicated than I wanted them to be.
Announcement: check out my Instagram to see a short video of me baking these cream puffs, shot by my wonderful friend, Abby George (also the wizard I have to thank for this week’s beautiful photography)! Dad, you’ve been asking for videos; here you go.
The recipe
Yield: about 18 cream puffs
Time: 3 hours
Ingredients
Cream Puffs:
½ stick (4 tbsp or 56 g) salted butter
½ c (115 g) water
½ c (63 g) flour
2–4 large eggs
Craquelin:
⅓ c (50 g) hazelnuts, toasted
½ stick (4 tbsp or 56 g) salted butter, room temperature
¼ c (55 g) light brown sugar
½ c (63 g) flour
Filling:
1 vanilla instant pudding mix (3.4 oz or 96 g)
2 c (460 g) whole milk
¼ tsp salt
⅓ c (50 g) hazelnuts, roasted
½ c (120 g) heavy cream
Instructions
Cream Puffs:
1. Preheat your oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. Cut the butter into small slices. Add the butter and water to a small pot and heat it over medium-low until the butter has melted. Raise the heat to medium and let the water boil.
3. When the water boils, add the flour all at once. Stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until the mixture forms a ball, then continue cooking and stirring for a further two minutes. Take the pot off the heat and set the dough aside to cool.
Craquelin:
4. Grind the hazelnuts in a food processor until they are very small pieces, but stop before they start to make nut butter.
5. Beat the butter in a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment at medium speed until soft. Add the sugar and beat at medium speed until very soft and well-combined.
6. Add the flour and mix at medium speed until well-combined. Add the hazelnuts and mix on low until well combined.
7. Roll the craquelin out in a thin ⅛-inch layer between two sheets of parchment paper. Move the parchment to a baking sheet and place it in the freezer.
Cream Puffs:
8. Transfer the dough to a large bowl. If the butter has separated out from it a little, that’s okay. When you add the eggs, it will come together again. Add eggs, one at a time. Stir vigorously between each addition to fully incorporate each one. Stop adding eggs when the dough becomes shiny, smooth, and it forms a V-shape when it falls off the spoon. I usually need 3 eggs.
9. Transfer the cream puff dough to a frosting bag fitted with a large round tip. Pipe a small amount of dough in the corner of each baking sheet, underneath the parchment, to secure it.
10. Pipe the cream puffs in about 2-tablespoon-sized balls on the baking sheets, spacing them at least 2 inches apart.
11. Take the craquelin out of the freezer and cut out small circles about the size of the cream puffs. Place a disk of craquelin on top of each cream puff. If you don’t have enough, roll the craquelin out again, freeze it for 10 minutes, then cut out the remaining disks.
12. Bake the cream puffs for 30 minutes. The edges of the craquelin should turn golden brown and the puffs should feel firm and crisp to the touch.
13. Once the cream puffs are cool enough to touch, transfer them to a wire rack.
Filling:
14. While the cream puffs are baking, make the filling. Whisk together the pudding mix, milk, and salt for two minutes, then transfer to the fridge.
15. Chop the hazelnuts into small pieces, small enough to fit through a large round piping tip.
16. When the cream puffs are cooled and ready to be filled, stir the hazelnuts into the pudding.
17. Whip the cream in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment on medium speed until it holds soft peaks.
18. Fold the cream gently into the pudding mixture until it is no longer streaky. Fill a frosting bag fitted with a large circular tip with the cream, then pipe it into the sides of the cream puffs. Serve immediately.
Notes and tips
If your hazelnuts aren’t already toasted, do so by laying them out in a single layer on a sheet pan. Bake them at 325°F for 20–30 minutes, shaking the pan every 10 minutes, until they are light golden brown all over. They will start to taste bitter if they get dark golden brown. If the hazelnuts still have skins, pour them into a hand towel while still hot, wrap them up, and rub the towel firmly over the counter to dislodge the skins.
Craquelin is a crunchy topping on cream puffs that gives them beautiful domed tops and a lovely texture.
Soft peaks means that the cream will form a little peak when you lift the whisk out of the bowl, but the tip of it will fall over. Stiff peaks are when the tips don’t fall over when lifting the whisk out.
Gently fold the whipped cream into the filling by using a spatula. Cut through the middle of the mixture, then lift from the bottom and gently fold onto the top. Rotate the bowl, repeating, until the mixture is uniform and no longer streaky.
The cream puffs will keep for about 2 hours in the fridge, but are best enjoyed as soon as they are filled. (The shells and nuts get soggy if they sit for longer than that.) If you want to make them ahead of time, store the cooled shells in the freezer overnight, make the pudding, and chop the nuts for the filling. Thaw the shells, uncovered, and finish the filling while they are thawing. Fill and serve right away.
The story
I promise that I am trying to develop some simple and easy recipes. I hoped this would be one of them; the start was promising. I used a vanilla instant pudding as the base for the filling, doctored it up with a little bit of salt, and folded chopped hazelnuts into it. It tasted so good that I have now fully jumped off the from-scratch crème pâtissière train. (Unless, of course, you need to flavor said crème pat in a specific way, like the pudding for my Chai Latte cake. That one I stand by. But the malted almond one? Past me didn’t know what she was talking about. Don’t waste your time making that filling from scratch. Instead, add some almond extract and ¼ teaspoon of salt to a vanilla instant pudding.) So yes, great start, but just one problem: the cream puffs didn’t taste much like hazelnut.
I had seen contestants on The Great British Baking Show top their cream puffs with a crunchy shell called craquelin, and I’d always wanted to try it. It looked like the perfect place to incorporate some ground hazelnuts and didn’t seem difficult to make. You just beat everything in a stand mixer, then roll it out to a very thin 1/8-inch thickness between two sheets of parchment paper, then freeze it, then cut it into circles, and then re-roll and re-freeze when it inevitably starts thawing on you before you finish cutting said circles. And then realize it’s too thin because it thaws and goes too floppy to cut almost immediately, and then overcompensate and roll it so thick it doesn’t cut well and then finally on the third try get it just right, but wait 10 minutes in between to chill the topping. Okay, maybe it wasn’t as easy as it looked.
But my cream puffs came out uniformly even and perfectly round. I’d made something worthy of a patisserie window, as Paul Hollywood says. And I’d done it in a home kitchen. I almost cried from happiness. The craquelin was staying.
But the cream puffs still didn’t taste much like hazelnut. So I toasted the nuts, which was a bit time-consuming. Ah, readers wouldn’t mind that too much; it was hands-off time. You just needed 25 minutes and an oven. No big deal. But just as I was ready to fill the current batch, I thought, This filling is pretty heavy from the nuts. What if I lightened it up a little? Would whipped cream taste really good in here? Whipped cream tastes good in everything. I whipped up cream, folded it into the filling, and I knew I’d decided right. It was light, airy, and finally tasted like hazelnut. My taste testers absolutely drooled.
And then I had to make the recipe one last time to check I had the amounts of filling, craquelin, and shells balanced, my first time doing the whole thing in one day, start to finish. It was a pain. The craquelin was temperamental. Chopping up the hazelnuts to just the right size (big enough to give a crunch, small enough to fit through the nozzle of a frosting bag) took me way longer than it should have. Piping the cream in resulted in sticky hands and counters, and a few splats on the floor, but I was committed to the piping bag. When you eat cream puffs, the filling shoots all over your face if you’ve cut the tops off and spooned in it.
Grumpy and tired, I didn’t think the work was going to be worth it, but I had to at least sample one and see. It had a delightfully crackly shell on the top from the craquelin, the filling was incredibly light and airy, the nuts gave texture to the silky cream, and it had a delicate hazelnut flavor. I could eat 5 of them in a sitting, I thought. I then proceeeded to do just that. I thought, yes, they are so delicious I would spend an entire afternoon making them again.
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