Itty Bitty Coffee Eclairs

I've had coffee éclairs on the brain for some time, and today I finally made them. I was taking them to a party, so I made them really small. Eclairs can be messy if they're more than one bite--not a good thing when you're standing on an expensive carpet, wearing nice clothes and trying to balance your snacks and glass of wine in a crowded roomful of possibly-tipsy people. For the party, I alternated them on a tray with equally-tiny cream puffs. That's a demitasse cup in the photo, if you want to get an idea of the scale.

The shells for éclairs and cream puffs are made from exactly the same dough, a simple pâte à choux (that's French for "cabbage paste"). The recipe is simple and foolproof: bring a cup of water and six tablespoons of butter to a boil in a heavy saucepan, then take off the heat, add a cup of flour and stir it up. Next add four egg yolks, one at a time, stirring well after each addition. Stir the whole thing a minute or two more over a medium flame to evaporate excess moisture. Then you just pipe the pâte onto a buttered baking sheet in whatever shapes you want. My éclairs were less than two inches long, and my cream puffs were an inch or so in diameter. (They do grow a bit in the oven.) To get that size, I used a pastry bag with no tip on it. You could also make cream puffs by just dropping blobs of dough onto the sheets with a spoon. This recipe made 75 little baked shells.

I baked these at 425 degrees until they were light brown and crisp--about 20 minutes perhaps. Then I filled them with pastry cream (made from scratch the proper way, with a double boiler and four more eggs, but you could use vanilla pudding if you didn't want to bother or were afraid; do it wrong and you end up with runny sauce or else scrambled eggs).

I frosted the cream puffs with icing made from melted Ghiradelli dark chocolate thinned with a bit of cream, and the éclairs with an icing made from confectioner's sugar, cream, and a bit of espresso powder. If you want them totally authentic and a little smoother and prettier, make your own fondant instead. It's a lot more work and tastes exactly the same.