Classic Cream Puffs

March 15, 2016

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Classic Cream Puffs dusted with powdered sugar, sitting on a cutting board.

Hello there LLK friends! My boys are home for Spring Break this week, and we have all sorts of fun things planned to do together. So I won’t stay long, but just thought I’d pop in real quick here to share this Classic Cream Puff recipe with you, and then I’ll be back again when the boys are back in school.

I’m sure many of you have made cream puffs more times than you can count, and there is really nothing too special about the way I made them. But I thought I’d share since this was the first time I had ever made a choux pastry (pronounced like “shoe”) and it had been on my baking bucket list for a while. I hosted a baby shower this weekend for a sweet baby girl, and it was so fun to serve these classic little delights.

A Classic Cream Puff dusted with powdered sugar, with a bite taken out of it, sitting on a cutting board with more cream puffs.

I filled the cream puffs with a simple homemade vanilla whipped cream, and dusted them with powdered sugar. I thought about doing a strawberry whipped cream (using crushed freeze dried strawberries for color and flavor) because I thought they might add to the girlie pink shower theme, but in the end decided to just keep them vanilla. Next time I’ll let myself be a little more creative.

There are truly so many wonderful things you can make with a good cream puff, both sweet and savory. I’m so glad I had the perfect occasion to make them for. You should have seen my boys when I gave them all the okay to come home after the ladies had left. They stood wide eyed at my little leftover dessert buffet and just gobbled everything up. Made for an easy clean-up!

Classic Cream Puff dough that has been piped onto a Silpat lined baking sheet.

Tips for Cream Puff Success

If you want to make your cream puffs look uniform, scoop the pastry dough into a large plastic zip top bag (or pastry bag) and either just cut the corner off (about 1/2 inch) or use a large piping tip. I used a piping tip and tried to make my dough mounds tall rather than wide. For more rustic looking cream puffs, just use a spoon to make little mounds.
Bake the puffs at 375 degrees for 25 minutes, and then use a wooden skewer to poke a few holes in the sides of each one, and then bake for another 8 minutes or so. This allows the steam to escape and the inside of the puff to bake properly.
You want the top of your puff to be golden brown, and sound hollow when tapped.
You can freeze the cream puffs (I froze mine unfilled in a plastic freezer zip top bag) and just thaw for an hour at room temperature the day you would like to fill them.
Make your filling as sweet as you prefer. Start with 3 tablespoons of powdered sugar, taste, and add more if you like. Remember that the pastry dough itself is not very sweet, but will be slightly sweeter when dusted with powdered sugar.
To fill your cream puffs, you can either cut off the top third, fill with cream, and then replace the lid, or you can use a filling tip to pipe the cream into the center. I find that this way is a little easier to to eat and counts as finger food, with no fork required.

Did you make this recipe?

Please let me know how it turned out for you! Leave a comment below and share a picture on Instagram with the hashtag #lovelylittlekitchen

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