Hay Hay It's Choux!

Hay Hay It’s Donna Day this month is hosted by Susana of Home Gourmets and the theme is choux pastry. I have never made choux pastry before and so was quite excited to try it out. I thought about making chocolate éclairs, but in the end used my choux pastry for a savoury offering, making gruyere gougeres.



We had friends over for dinner on Saturday night, so for nibbles to go with drinks I made little gruyere chouox puffs. Choux pastry is made by bringing water and butter to the boil, adding flour and then beating in eggs. Once my eggs were beaten in I added some grated gruyere cheese, spooned the little puffs onto a baking sheet, sprinkled them with more cheese and then baked them. When they came out of the oven I sprinkled them with a mixture of smoked paprika and sea salt.



These were so yummy! Very easy to make and great with pre-dinner drinks. Apparently they freeze quite well too – but we ate all of them! They are like eating a very airy version of a cheese puff. I will definitely be making these again and I would like to try different kinds of cheese as well.

Thanks Susana for the interesting challenge!

Hay, Hay, It's clafoutis

The Hay Hay It’s Donna Day challenge for April was chosen by Bron Marshall ( a fellow Nzer). The choice was clafoutis, which is a French batter pudding traditionally made with cherries. I actually used the flavours that Bron suggested of plum and chocolate, as that was actually a Donna Hay recipe that I had spotted a while ago and had on my to do list to make.



On Monday night we had good friends up from Invercargill, so I made the clafoutis for pudding. Our main was Moroccan chicken with an orange and mint salsa from Dish magazine, with apricot and almond pilaf and rocket salad, then the clafoutis to follow. The clafoutis batter is made from a little bit of flour, eggs and cream. I always feel a bit funny about making things solely with cream, so I used lite cream and whole cream milk. Rather than fresh plums, I used canned plums and the batter is poured round the plums in a shallow dish. I then put chunks of chocolate into the batter and baked it.



The dessert has an interesting texture – you almost expect it to be sponge like, but it is actually quite dense. The chunks of chocolate were delicious little surprises – melting when the pudding was hot and lovely chunks when cold the next day. We had it with thickened cream, but it is just as nice eaten cold out of the fridge the next day! You can see the recipe on Bron’s blog.