Choux try-out

The Great British Bake Off has finished again, leaving us with a huge gap to fill on Wednesday evening. But also, many baking ideas.
One thing I've been wanting to make for a very long time is choux pastry. In the earlier Bake Off seasons, this was presented as one of the most difficult things to make, apart from filo pastry. Now, in the later seasons, all the contestants can just whip up a choux no questions asked, although they do explain that it is a tricky thing to get right.
I've investigated the stuff, and discovered that it is in fact twice cooked dough; first you cook it when you combine butter and flour with boiling water, and then you cook it again in the oven. What I'd like to know is who ever thought of this first, and why anyone in their right mind would want to tip flour into boiling water and then beat in eggs without having them scramble. Because the resulting dough isn't really all that special, it's actually pretty tasteless, and has to be filled with some kind of cream to be appetising.

Anyway, the ingredients list is very short:

125 ml water
50 g butter
65 g flour
2 eggs (beaten)

Preheat the oven to 200 C.
Put the water and butter in a pan and heat on a gentle heat until the butter has melted. Then bring the water to a boil, take off the heat, and quickly dump in all the flour at once. Start stirring frantically until the mixture forms a ball-like dough and comes away from the sides.
(I never thought this was actually going to happen on the first try, and that I was going to waste a lot of water, butter and flour in the process, but lo and behold, it worked!)

Ball-like choux pastry sans eggs.

Now add the egg mixture a little at a time, beating thoroughly between until all the egg is absorbed. At this point, I realised I might have used a bigger pan, because the mixture kept sloshing over the side due to my vigorous beating.
When all the egg is absorbed you have nice shiny mixture, which you can pipe in whatever shape you want onto a baking parchment. I made some eclair shapes and some choux bun shapes.
Then it goes in the oven for 10 minutes at 200 C, and after that you turn the heat down to 170 and bake for another 30 minutes or until they are golden brown all around. I've found wildly varying baking times for these, so this is what I did, but I've also read recipes where they tell you to turn the heat up instead of down after the first 10 minutes.

As soon as they are done, take them out of the oven and pierce them to let the steam out. I was too late doing this with some of them, which means the steam will turn back into water and soak your choux buns, making them sloppy and inedible.

Leave to cool completely, split open, and fill with your favourite cream (I used whipped cream). You can drizzle chocolate over the top if you haven't forgotten to buy dark chocolate (which I did, and I felt too lazy to go back to the store).

Eclairs filled with whipped cream (no chocolate).

Choux pastry in itself is pretty tasteless, as I already mentioned, but these were quite okay when filled with whipped cream. I am going to make them again pretty soon, letting them cook a bit longer and letting out the steam earlier, so they don't turn sloppy and we can actually eat all of them. But for a first attempt, it went a lot better than I'd ever expected!

KitchenAid love

Wow, I actually haven't written anything in the whole of September. How did that go by so fast?
Anyway, now that it's October, and autumn is about to start and my birthday is creeping up (which is less and less of a good thing as years go by) I am hoping there will be more time to actually write stuff here. Because it's not that stuff hasn't been happening. A lot of stuff has been happening, it just that I was simply experiencing the stuff, and not able to write about it. And I will now stop using the word 'stuff'.

One of the things that happened which I can write about because I can be relatively brief is that I bought a KitchenAid. An Artisan KitchenAid, to be exact, in a deep red colour. And if you don't know what a KitchenAid is, go look up pictures now.
I've been wanting to have a KitchenAid for as long as I knew they existed, but first there was the sharing-a-kitchen-with-loads-of-other-(thieving)-people issue, then there was the no-money problem, and then there was the our-kitchen-is-smaller-than-most-people's-walk-in-closet thing. The last hasn't technically been resolved, but when brand-new KitchenAids were being sold for 2/3rds of the normal price, I couldn't resist. So I bought one (with some mental support from my boyfriend) and then waited patiently for 3 weeks for it to arrive.
But oh, how pretty it is! How shiny and strong and robust. Also, how heavy (due to the smallness of the kitchen, I have to move the thing in place whenever I want to use it, and KitchenAids clearly don't expect to be put away in dusty cupboards). But it works like a charm. It came with a big (4.6 l) steel bowl and 3 types of mixers, and I'm already planning to buy loads of accessories once my bank account has recovered. I used it to make brownies for last weekend's family day, and all agreed that they were very tasty brownies indeed.
So apart from the storage issue, I am very happy that my KitchenAid dream finally came true. Now we'll just have to buy another kitchen to fit it in.