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Dessert

Coffee Eclairs

A pastry made of a butter‑water‑flour dough filled with coffee‑flavored cream and iced with coffee‑sugar glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Coffee Eclairs

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the choux dough

  1. Melt the butter with the boiling water in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon for 3 minutes until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan.

  3. Remove the mixture from heat.

  4. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring thoroughly after each addition.

Bake

  1. Preheat the oven to 400 °F (200 °C).

  2. Slightly grease an éclair pan.

  3. Spoon the dough mixture into the pan.

  4. Bake for about 15 minutes, watching carefully to prevent scorching.

Make the coffee filling and icing

  1. Make an incision in the side of each éclair.

  2. Fill the incisions with sweetened whipped cream flavored with coffee or coffee filling.

  3. Boil 1 cup of strong black coffee with 1 tablespoon cream and ½ cup sugar for the coffee filling.

  4. Blend 2 heaping teaspoons of cornstarch with a little cold coffee and stir into the boiling mixture.

  5. Gradually pour the hot coffee mixture over 2 beaten eggs, stirring briskly.

  6. If the mixture is not thick enough, heat it over boiling water until slightly thickened, but do not boil.

  7. Boil sugar and ⅓ cup strong coffee for the icing until it forms a thread when dropped from a spoon.

  8. Remove the icing from heat and stir until it begins to thicken.

  9. Coat each éclair with the icing.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the dough structure and give the baked shells lift and a hollow interior.
Flour
Forms the starch structure that holds the choux dough together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the choux dough.
Cornstarch
Thickens the coffee filling as it heats.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and, boiled to a thread, forms the glossy icing.

The step that matters

Stirring the hot coffee into the beaten eggs. Pouring hot liquid onto eggs too quickly, without stirring, can scramble them. Gradual pouring with brisk stirring tempers the eggs so the filling thickens smoothly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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