Bake Off with The Bake Off - Pastry!

Still playing catch up! This week is Pastry week! My challenge this week was to make something that I have never made before from the Pastry episode - Éclairs! The twist was that they had to be different than chocolate and cream and Gav had to like them!

Week 7 - Pastry Week!

White Chocolate and Raspberry Cheesecake Éclairs

Ingredients:
For the Choux Pastry:
65g Plain Flour
120ml Water
pinch of salt
50g Butter
2 Eggs (beaten)
For the Filling:
200g Cream Cheese
100g Icing Sugar
50g Raspberries
For the Icing:
150g White Chocolate (melted)

I decided to base these Eclairs on a cheesecake because Gav loves cheesecake and I wanted to mash the two things together to make a hybrid of awesome pastry cheesecake.

Firstly, I preheated the oven to 200C and lined a baking tray with foil. I would advise you to ensure that you have baking parchment in your cupboard before embarking on such a project, otherwise you may find yourself also using foil too, although to be fair, the foil worked fine, so use either! Anyway, I greased the foil and left it for later.

I put the water into a saucepan with the salt and butter and heated gently until the butter had melted. Bring the watery mixture tot he boil and add the flour, remove from the heat and beat until smooth. Putting the saucepan back on the heat to cook the dough slightly, so that it starts to come away from the sides - resembling PlayDough. Leave to cool.

Apologies this is a little wordier and less picture based than usual - it suddenly dawned on me half way through that I needed to be documenting this for The BaKerry! Talk about a dopey moment.

Once cooled, I added the beaten eggs to the mixture and whisked it in my mixer. The dough became very glossy looking. I then spooned it into my piping gun and piped them onto the baking tray

Hopefully yours will be less messy than mine

They were in the oven for around 15 minutes, at which point I reduced the temperature without opening the door and to 170C and left for another 10 minutes - A good tip from Mr H.

To avoid them going soggy with the steam trapped inside, I made small holes in the side of each Eclair, before returning them to the oven for another 5 minutes to make sure they were crisp. Leave to cool.

Meanwhile, playing with sugar...

Using the back of the a ladle, I created a basket. I filled some Raspberries with white chocolate too, just to pass some time

I filled some Raspberries with white chocolate too, just to pass some time and because the idea seemed delicious

Whilst the Éclairs cooled, I made the cheesecake filling. I creamed together the cream cheese and icing sugar and added the raspberries and squashed them in.

I piped the cheesecake filling into the Éclairs and spread the white chocolate on the top

Overall they tasted great, they were very messy to make though, as you can see from the picture! Needless to say, although I do not feel like rushing back into the kitchen to make another batch, I think I'll give them another whirl in the future :) 3 out of 5 points earned.