Green Tea Cream Puffs

Cream puffs are my not-so-secret weapon. 

I use the America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book recipe!

   

The first time I made them was for a friend's surprise going-away party. He had made like, a hundred chocolate and orange cream puffs for his co-op's mystery-themed dinner party, and they were delicious. So I was inspired to make some for him! Behold, a photo that contains immense enjoyment of said cream puffs: 

Bad timing? Or thinly-veiled disgust?

The first batch was made with great trepidation and a cut-off heavy duty ziploc bag. I've since upgraded to a plastic-lined cloth pastry bag. It also helps that I have a stand mixer named JOKER (trust me, you need something to mix fast for tempering those yolks).


After baking twenty-something batches of cream puffs over the last two years, I've perfected them. Just kidding! I haven't. But I do know what a good puff looks like, and what a bad puff looks like:

Probably not supposed to reproduce this image from
America's Test Kitchen

But cream puffs are temperamental little things, and the height really does matter. Squat puffs will be denser, with more of that foamy, eggy batter clogging up fill-able spaces. Risen puffs are airy, crisper, and have more room to fill with pastry cream. Ah, the pastry cream. Sometimes an extra minute on the stove will render the pastry cream too thick and gloppy. In which case I'll dump the whole batch into JOKER, whip it up at high speeds, and hope for the best. There is a narrow window of success in which the pastry cream will be thick enough to pipe out neatly (and not thin and runny), but not so thick that it's like set custard. 

Whew.

As seen on this blog.

Recently, I took a foray into Experimental Land, and so I made green tea cream puffs.

With. Green. Tea!


I was looking for matcha powder at my local Chinese grocery store, but couldn't find any. I did, however, find "Green Tea Powder" and thought, "Heck, I could make that myself!" So I used my coffee grinder to pulverize some good-quality green tea leaves. I sifted the resulting powder, and it looked pretty darned like green tea powder (cuz you know, it was). 


I didn't know how the powder would hold up in cooking, and so I halved my pastry cream recipe for a test batch. My pastry cream recipes call for 5 egg yolks! That's a lot! I usually leave the whites for my brother to consume, but seriously, baking cream puffs is always an investment in eggs. I feel like I use up an entire coop's worth. When I double the recipe, I'm left with 10 whites, and so I sometimes make an angel food cake with them. Waste not!


Anyways, the resulting cream was speckled with foresty green, and it actually tastes quite good! I'm pleased. [Imagine picture here]


UPDATE: I brought them to my postbac program's end-of-the-year celebration and saw in my periphery that some were left uneaten on plates. Oh well. Experimental flavors don't always bode well.