Cream Puffs Make a Bad Day Go 'Pouf'

I like to relax by baking. Tonight, after a long, busy day (chastising a publicist, turning down two pitches and offending a designer by failing to call his boutique a "fashion house"), I made cream puffs. The recipe for the puff pastry comes from the Vietnamese-language cookbook that my mom bought in Saigon decades ago. It is the standard recipe for pate choux. To help make the puffs even puffier, I used Swans Down cake flour.

I also used mini cupcake tins. The standard-size tins would have worked. But I realized that the smaller the cream puff, the easier it is to pop into your mouth. Plus, you don't feel that bad if you eat more than one. Besides, I could never achieve the uniformity of Beard Papa's massive cream puffs.

What's also different with my cream puffs is the filling: It has cream cheese in it.

In addition to cream cheese, the filling also calls for instant vanilla pudding mix. I concede this does not sound very healthy or gourmet. I don't think the recipe for the filling came from my mom's cookbook. If it had, she could have started the trend for semi-homemade years before Sandra Lee did. Still, after tasting the cream cheese pudding, you'll have to agree that it is quite yummy.

It's important not to open the oven while the profiteroles are baking.

Otherwise, the pastry won't be able to build the equivalent of an edible bouffant.

It's also important to let the profiteroles cool completely before filling them with the cream cheese pudding. Some people use a pastry bag to pump the pudding into the profiterole. I prefer to cut the profiterole in half and spooning a dollop of pudding on the base to make a little sandwich.

Et voila! I usually don't include recipes because I'm too lazy to type them. But since this one is so easy and short, I've listed it here.
For the batter:
1/2 cup of butter
1 cup of water
1 cup of Swans Down cake flour
4 eggs.
Preheat the oven to 400 F. In a thick-bottomed sauce pan, melt the butter in the water. Turn off the heat. Add the cake flour and whip the mixture. Add the eggs one at a time while whipping the batter until smooth. Spoon into greased cupcake molds. Bake for 15 minutes.
For the filling:
1 3/4 cup of milk
8 ounces of cream cheese, softened
1 box of instant vanilla pudding.
With a hand mixer, beat the cream cheese in 1/2 cup of milk. Add the rest of the milk and the pudding mix. Beat until well-blended. Refrigerate the filling until it thickens and is ready to use.
Yield: 30 mini cream puffs

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