Choux Craquelin or Crispy Cream Puffs

A choux pastry aka cream puffs topped with a crispy, sweet cookie crust named craquelin in French, filled with light, airy and creamy pistachio ganache. They’re perfectly light and fluffy with a buttery, outer crust and a hollow interior perfect for your favorite filling! As delicious and fancy as it sounds! 

The cream puff is a very piece of magic because it starts out as a little ball of cooked dough that turns into a fluffy hollow puff in the oven. They are filled with really creamy, flavorful and not overly sweet pistachio ganache, which is simply to die for 💚 So how to make a perfect choux pastry with a crisp outer shell and a wonderful hollow inside? All right, here we go!

If you’re all new to these terms choux pastry or craquelin, then I’d say you are in the right place and these are all really easy to make once you get the hang of it. I’m hoping my foolproof recipes will help you master each of these with ease!

Pâte à choux, aka cream puff dough, is a baker’s putty, the mixture that becomes the cream puff as well as éclairs, beignets, churros, croquembouches, and tens more desserts. The dough is cooked before it’s baked, and when it goes into the oven, it emerges golden, ping-pong-ball light, a couple or three times its size and smell of warm butter and eggs. 

How to Make Choux au Craquelin aka Crispy Cream Puffs Video:

WHAT IS CHOUX AU CRAQUELIN?

The crunchy cracked topping you see on choux cream puffs is actually an elegant French technique that involves baking them with a dough called “craquelin.” With just butter, sugar, and flour, this simple dough gives a really great crunchy texture to your choux.

Here, the puffs are capped with a round of frozen sweet dough called craquelin, which produces a crunchy coating that’s a little like streusel. It adds enough texture and sweetness so that filling becomes a choice, not a necessity. As the choux pastry bakes and expands, the cookie disc craquelin bakes and forms a sweet, crisp, crackly crust on top, enveloping the top of the cream puff. 

To make the craquelin, pulse the butter, light brown sugar, and salt in a food processor or stand mixer until just blended and turns light in color. I have added brown sugar because it gives the taste of molasses to the crust. Add the sifted flour, and mix until you have moist curds.

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Gather the dough and pull it together into a ball by pressing the dough gently with hands. Put craquelin onto a piece of parchment paper. First spread it lightly with your fingers. Then, put another piece of parchment paper onto the craquelin, and roll it out to 2mm (1/12″) thickness using an adjustable rolling pin. Roll from the center towards one end, at the same time holding the opposite side of the paper, so it doesn’t slide. Put everything in the freezer for about an hour.

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How to Make Choux Pastry aka Cream Puffs:

We know that it comes from France. It’s a light, airy, crispy pastry used to make, cream puffs/profiteroles, choux au craquelin, croquembouches, gougères, French crullers and more. Flour, eggs, butter, and water are all you need to make it. And depending on who you ask, choux pastry is either super easy or insanely difficult to make. What’s up with that? Let’s find out.

How these little balls are so hollow and airy? You might wonder that choux pastry doesn’t use a chemical raising agent to rise. Instead, it uses air and moisture trapped in the dough to rise (water and eggs).

If your choux pastry recipe doesn’t always work, then THIS foolproof perfect choux pastry guide is for you. This post will help you understand WHY and HOW choux pastry works, with plenty of troubleshooting tips. 

To make choux pastry aka cream puffs put milk, water, butter into a saucepan, and bring the mixture to a boil. When it starts boiling reduce the heat to low, add the flour all at once and start stirring like mad with a flexible spatula. Stir and mash the dough until it comes together and leaves a film on the bottom of the pan. Keep cooking and stirring nonstop for another 3 minutes to dry but not color it.

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Scrape the dough into the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (or work with a hand mixer). Beat the dough for 2 minutes to cool it down a bit till 45C. Stir the eggs with a fork to break them up and then add to the dough in three additions, not at once, beating on medium speed. Beat until the dough is satiny and runs off the beater smoothly. It is very important that you don’t add eggs while the mixture is still hot, because it will become too runny! The choux mixture should be creamy, soft and shiny.

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Fit a 1/2” round nozzle in a pastry bag and pour the batter in the pastry bag. Remove the air with the help of a spatula and put it in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

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Prepare two baking pans. Put one template onto each pan (one with larger circles around 2 inches, and one with smaller ones around 1 inch), and line them with parchment paper and pipe blobs 5cm (2″) in diameter onto the larger template. Pipe smaller blobs – 2.5 (1″) in diameter. Keep the tip upright and pipe out smooth, gently twist and remove the tip.

Take chilled craquelin out from the freezer, and cut out larger discs for large blobs, and smaller discs for small blobs using round cutters. The diameter of cutters should be 5cm (2″) and 2.5cm (1″) respectively. Place craquelin discs onto the choux pastry blobs using a small spatula.

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How to Bake these?

Preheat your oven to 200°C (400°F), put your choux craquelin in the oven and bake the larger cream puffs first 20 min at 200C after that reduce the temperature to 180°C (350°F) another 10 min. Bake larger choux for about 30 minutes, and smaller choux for about 15 minutes, until nicely browned and puffed. Then, turn off the power of the oven and keep the oven door slightly open and let the puffs stay in for 15 min. Don’t remove the puffs immediately from the oven otherwise, the cream puffs will deflate.

CHOUX PASTRY TROUBLESHOOTING
WHY ARE MY PASTRY SHELLS FLAT, SOFT, AND SOGGY? 

Have your profiterole shells collapsed? Do your cream puffs have sunken concave bottoms? They’re not the round, hollow, perfect choux pastry shells you see in bakeries? So what causes this?

Chances are the dough was too wet and runny. When you pipe out the batter, it probably didn’t hold its shape. That means it has too little flour, or too much liquid in the form of water, eggs and/or butter. Also, the temperature of your batter is warm.

Removing the choux pastry from the oven too early is another reason why your choux shells will be flat. If they were soggy to start with, then they will not rise properly. But even if they do rise, they will deflate when they cool down, due to too much moisture inside the shell, especially if you take them out of the oven too soon. The shells didn’t have enough time to form a stable crust, so they collapse as they cool down.

You need to prick the shells towards the end of the baking time (and/or after), to allow the shells to dry out. If you don’t, the hot humid air will collapse the soft shell as it cools down.

How to Make Pistachio Ganache:

To make pistachio ganache soak gelatin in cold water. As soon as the gelatin softens take it out and squeeze to get rid of the excess water. Put cream into a bowl, and add glucose syrup and vanilla powder. Heat up this in the microwave. Then, add soaked gelatin and stir until it melts. Put the white chocolate into a bowl, and strain hot cream into the chocolate. Blend the mixture with an immersion blender until it becomes uniform. Then add pistachio paste and blend the mixture once more. Cover it with cling film, and leave it in the fridge for a couple of hours.

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Ho to Make Pistachio Paste?**

• Bring a small pot of water to boil, then add pistachios for 1 minute only. Drain immediately and add to an ice bath to “shock” them and stop the cooking process. An ice bath is a bowl filled with cold water and ice cubes.
• Drain the pistachios, remove all the ice cubes and press them between your fingers or use your fingernails to remove the skins. This is an easy process.
• Add all peeled pistachios to a high-speed blender or a food processor and blend/process until paste consistency. Scrape down the sides often.
• Store the rest in an airtight container in the fridge.

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How to Make Strawberry Filling?

To make strawberry gel put sugar into a bowl. Add agar-agar powder or gelatine and stir well with a whisk. Then, put strawberry puree, water, sugar, and agar-agar mixture into a saucepan. Stir to combine. Cook this mixture until it boils, stirring well to prevent it from burning. Allow it to boil for about one minute, and then, remove the pan from the stove. Transfer the mixture into a measuring cup, and cover it with cling film. Put in the fridge until it cools down completely.

Put raspberry gel into a piping bag fitted with 1mm tip, and carefully puncture and fill your small choux craquelin with it. Cut off the top of your larger choux shells using a serrated knife.

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Put pistachio ganache into a piping bag fitted with a star tip, and pipe a middle-sized blob into the bottom part of your choux shells. Then, insert your smaller choux, filled with raspberry gel, into the ganache blob. Pipe some more ganache all around and over the smaller choux until it is completely covered.

To decorate the top part of your choux shells pipe one small blob of ganache on the top using a piping bag fitted with 6mm (about 1/4″) tip. Then, sprinkle some chopped pistachios onto the ganache. Insert one fresh raspberry in the middle. Place the whole ensemble onto the ganache. Finally, pipe some raspberry gel dots all around the ganache.

There, your lovely pistachio and raspberry choux craquelin is done! Enjoy!