Chouquettes, French mini spheres, filled with a raspberry cream
Chouquettes are heavenly bite-sized French sugar puffs made from choux pastry - the same used for éclairs or profiteroles.
But they are much more simplistic than their more lavish brethren, and the spheric morsels lend themselves for a perfect in-between snack, though you will struggle to have just one.
If you want to spruce up your chouquettes, try filling them with raspberry cream which conjures up spring-like splashes of colour and adds a little fruity-freshness to the delight.
Choux pastry itself is not sweet, which means you could also go half and half and fill some of a batch's spheres with a savoury filling, like cream cheese and herbs, suggests baking book author Agnes Prus.
"But don't forget to mark the savoury and sweet chouquettes or serve them on separate plates," she warns.
Ingredients for 30 mini chouquettes:
For the choux pastry:
55 g butter
65 g milk
65 ml water
1/2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
70 g wheat flour
2 medium or small-sized eggs, whisked
For the filling:
50 g sugar
30 g freeze-dried raspberries
400 g whipped cream
approx. 1 tbsp icing sugar for sprinkling (optional)
approx. 2 tbsp of caster sugar for sprinkling
Preparation:
1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (top/bottom heat) and line a baking tray with baking paper. For the choux pastry, heat the butter, milk, 65 ml of water, sugar and salt in a pan until the butter has melted. Add the flour all at once and continue to heat for 1 minute, stirring with a wooden spoon. Pour the batter into a bowl and leave to cool slightly.
2. Stir in the eggs one at a time with a mixer or wooden spoon. The batter should be hard to tear from the spoon and not too runny. Fill into a piping bag with a 9 mm diameter nozzle and pipe thick dots (3 cm diameter) onto the baking tray. Optionally, sift some icing sugar on top. Sprinkle the pearl sugar over the dots and press down lightly.
3. Bake the puffs for approx. 25-30 mins. until golden brown. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack. To make the filling, finely grind the sugar and raspberries in a food processor or blender. Whip the cream and mix with the raspberry sugar. Fill into a piping bag with a long nozzle and fill the puffs from the bottom. Enjoy on the same day.
