Daring Bakers and a Classic

It’s time again for another monthly Daring Bakers challenge, this time hosted by Meeta of What’s for Lunch Honey? and Tony of Tony Tahhan. I was away on vacation when the recipe was announced so Helen quickly emailed me to tell me that this month’s challenge was going to be Pierre Herme’s chocolate eclairs. The first thing I thought was “my family and friends are going to love this” and my second thought was, “I better not mess up a classic!”.

For a few days I thought about different flavor possibilities although I knew I wanted to keep part of the recipe as it was given to us with the chocolate pastry cream. I still have quite a bit of matcha in my pantry so I decided to make some green tea eclairs and profiteroles in honor of the other great parisian patissier Sadaharu Aoki, who is also turning fairly new ingredients into classics.

I made two different pate a choux recipes by keeping one plain and infusing the other one with green tea. I did the same with the pastry cream fillings by adding chocolate to one batch and green tea to the other. I played around with the presentations as well, making a chocolate religieuse with cocoa nib tuile and ice cream filled profiteroles with warm chocolate sauce using some leftover honey ice cream I had from the mamia post last week.

A big thank you to Meeta and Tony for hosting this month’s challenge. Please visit their websites for the recipes and also go here to check out the Daring Bakers blogroll.