Lichen Cream Puffs
Ingredients
For the Puffs
- 8 tbsp butter
- 1 cup water
- 1 cup flour
- 4 eggs
- 1 tbsp cocoa powder
- 5 drops black food dye
Craquelin
- 100 grams sugar
- 100 grams butter
- 100 grams flour
Cream
- 3 Cups Heavy Cream
- 4 tbsp sugar
- 1 tbsp vanilla
Instructions
Cream Puffs
- In a sauce pan add the butter to the water and bring to a boil. Once the butter is fully melted, dump in the flour and cocoa all at once and stir vigorously until the batter comes together into a ball.
- Dump the dough ball into a mixer fitted with a paddle attachment and beat in the 4 eggs, 1 at a time until fully incorporated.
- Put the batter into a piping bag and pipe small, 1/2 inch blobs onto a baking sheet, spaced at least an inch apart.
Make the craquelin
- Mix the butter, sugar, and flour until it creates a pasty dough.
- Divide into three portions and color red, green, and yellow or other colors as desired. Roll out the dough into a thin sheet. During this you can put blobs of the different colored doughs together to make a short of marbled coloration. Freeze for 10 minutes.
- Cut circles out of the craquelin, roughly the same size or smaller than the unbaked cream puffs. Place one circle on top of each puff.
- The cream puffs are ready for the oven.. Bake at 400 until they turn golden brown.
Make the cream
- Whip vanilla, cream, and sugar on high until stiff peaks form.
Fill the cream puffs
- Put the cream in a piping bag fitted with a filling tip (or you can poke a hole in each cream puff and just use a pastry bag without a tip, but this is a bit more challenging). You can also cut the cream puffs in half if you want to fill them without using a pastry bag at all, but it won't look quite as nice.
- Insert the tip of the pastry bag into the bottom of each cream puff and fill them up! Eat within a few hours so they keep their nice texture and don't get soggy.