Choux paste and Chiffon

They all baked up fine except the largest one, which may have exceeded the ability of the rising dough to support itself. I have no idea how she made hers so I don’t know if her batter was different or what. I suspect now that I may also have remembered them as larger than they really were. In any event, we stuffed the pastries with whip cream and the chocolate pastry filling we’d made the day before and dusted them with powdered sugar. They were good, but I think I prefer my cream puffs filled with plain whipped cream (like grandma’s, of course).

Friday we made chiffons, and our group (formed again by flavor) made lime chiffon. I was intending to put it into a graham cracker crust, but we ran out of graham, so I had to choose something else, which in retrospect was fortunate, although I didn’t think so at the time. I decided to try using the puff pastry left over from earlier in the week to make a pie crust: I rolled it out thin, trimmed it flush to the tin, and blind baked it under two more tins and a 4-pound weight until it was a beautiful, thin, golden brown. Then I poured the chiffon into it and put the pie in the cooler to set. Turned out to be the best thing I made all week. The lime chiffon is a dessert, and does have a lot of sugar in it, both of which we’re getting sick of; but it’s so light because of the egg whites, the acid of the limes balances the sugar nicely, and the puff pastry crust was marvelous– crispy and buttery– that Edith and I actually enjoyed it.