Forays into baking

The world is divided into cooks and bakers and the rare few who can do both. My friend Christine can but I fall primarily into the first category, with an irrational fear of the second. I think it first grew when I took Home Ec in eighth grade with Mrs. Petrowski, who always smelled like talc powder. The only things I remember from the cooking portion of that class is that she taught us to always soak our dishes in hot, soapy water ("it does the work for you!") and that we had to make blueberry muffins. I can't remember if the recipe was anything special, or if we used real blueberries or anything else specific but I do remember that we were put in groups, there was a boy named Anthony Romano in my group and we managed to turn out these god-awful muffins - soggy and uncooked, and somehow, green. Don't ask me how, but when Mrs. Petrowski saw these she threated to fail us for the day and since then, I've been afraid to bake. I'm not very comfortable with specific measurements and I hate cooking from recipes, and I find that baking, unless you do it frequently, requires both those things.

I'm trying to get better with baking, if anything because if I find myself on Top Chef one day, I want to be ready for the dessert challenge. I think part of baking is that it seems like an event, so doing it requires an attitude of "I will conquer this". On Thanksgiving, I made my first pie crust from scratch and felt pretty proud about that, even more so because of the lattice top.

Last week, I was feeling courageous so I decided to try something a little more complicated with greater room for failure - cream puffs with a chocolate sauce. I found the recipe in How To Cook Everything and was particularly intrigued by the dough. It requires making a pâte à choux, whose literal translation is "cabbage paste" for the way it should look. It is the dough used in making cream puffs, eclairs, profiteroles, beignets, and what I am most excited to make, gougères, or cheese puffs. The really cool thing about choux pastry is that when baked, it rises to about three times its original size because the air in the batter steams and expands the dough. As a result, you're left with a hole in the middle of your pastry that is perfect for filling.

I also made a vanilla custard to fill my pastries with and made a scrumptious chocolate sauce to drizzle on top by melting dark chocolate in heavy cream.

The results of the baking:
It turns out you can only eat so many of these before you feel like you might die, the chief ingredients being butter, heavy cream and sugar but I brought them into the office and they were a hit.