In the mood for cream puffs a few years ago, I rooted around in my mother's recipe shelf and found a what turned out to be an excellent recipe for "Bavarian Cream," with a recipe for choux pastry puffs on the back. The Bavarian Cream, also known as crème bavaroise, turned out to be a wonderfully light and fluffy filling that I could eat all day on its own. Perhaps that's why the original recipe says to double the filling for a single recipe of puffs.
Now, under ordinary circumstances, *of course* I would double filling in proportion to pastry, on anything from pizza to pineapple upside-down cake to a piece of breakfast toast. The filling is the good part!! However, I don't find this necessary with this recipe. Experience has taught me that cream puffs benefit structurally from NOT overstuffing. It takes self control and a sense of restraint, but it's worth it for the eating experience. When I used the recipe as written, I only had a single extra puff leftover without cream to fill it. A doubled batch of cream would have been way too much...but then, there's nothing wrong with having some extra cream filling in the fridge ;-)
So the problem was that it took an awful lot of deciphering to discover how good this recipe was in the first place, since the directions were a messily scrawled disaster. In retrospect, now that I've gone through it and know what's going on, the main problem with the original recipe was that it didn't include a list of ingredients. So that was the first thing I made sure to write out when I 'translated' the scrawl into a legible, workable recipe.
Without further ado, here it is!
Ingredients
Bavarian Cream
1 pkg unflavored gelatin (.25 oz)
1/4 cup + 1 cup milk
4 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup whipping cream
Cream Puffs (choux pastry)
1 stick butter or margarine
1 cup water
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
Recipe makes 24 small puffs.
Directions
Step 1: Make the cream
Mix gelatin and 1/4 C milk and set aside. Scald 1 C milk (in a double boiler, if available). Beat yolks and sugar, and add to warm milk. Heat without boiling, stirring occasionally until thick enough to coat a spoon. It is important to do this step slowly, or the custard will curdle. Finally add milk/gelatin mixture and vanilla, and continue heating until gelatin is fully dissolved. Chill in refrigerator about 30 minutes, until it is no longer warm but not fully set and gelled.
Meanwhile, whip the heavy whipping cream until stiff peaks form. Gently fold the whipped cream into the fully cooled custard mixture, and chill for a further hour. Note: if you've left it to cool for a long time and your custard has set into a gelatinous mass, no worries. You can easily get it smooth again by whipping it with a hand mixer on high speed for several minutes, until it's smooth enough to fold without lumps.
Step 2: Make the pastry
Boil butter and water. Add flour and salt, and stir until it forms a ball. Add eggs one at a time, stirring until smooth after each addition. Drop by tablespoon onto greased baking sheet. Bake at 400 degrees F for 30-35 minutes until golden brown. Remove from the baking tray and poke a hole into each puff. This will release the steam, and you'll need to do it anyway when you fill them later. Let cool on a rack.
Left: water & butter for cream puffs
Right: heating milk, sugar & eggs for cream filling
Left: cream mixture set aside after adding milk/gelatin
Right: adding the last egg to the cream puff dough
Half of the choux balls on a cookie sheet
Step 3: Assemble the cream puffs
When the pastries and Bavarian cream filling are both cool, fill a large pastry bag with the cream. It is not necessary to use a tip on the pastry bag. Poke a hole or make a slit into the top of a pastry puff, insert the pastry bag, and fill the puff. Do not overfill, or you'll end up with a mess that's difficult to eat. Finally, sift powdered sugar on top for a sweet garnish. The choux pastry itself is not sweet, so the sugar on top is quite important.
Enjoy!
Baked puffs & Bavarian cream, w/whipping cream folded in
Filled cream puffs (still need powdered sugar coating!)
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