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Dessert

Cream Cakes and Eclairs

A sweet pastry made from a water, flour, butter, and egg dough, baked into cakes or eclairs and filled with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cream Cakes and Eclairs

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the choux paste

  1. Combine water and butter in a pan and bring the mixture to a boil.

  2. Sift the flour.

  3. Add the sifted flour all at once to the boiling water.

  4. Stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan.

  5. Remove the pan from heat.

  6. Beat in the eggs, two at a time, until fully incorporated.

Bake and fill the cream buns

  1. For cream buns, take a dessert spoonful of the mixture and place it on a lightly greased baking sheet.

  2. Cover the baking sheet with another upside-down tin.

  3. Bake in a very hot oven (450°F / 230°C) for about 25 minutes without removing the cover.

  4. Once baked, make an incision in the side of each bun.

  5. Fill each bun with whipped cream or cake filling.

Shape, bake and finish the eclairs

  1. For eclairs, use a piping bag to shape the mixture on the baking sheet.

  2. Bake the eclairs as directed.

  3. Fill the eclairs with cream.

  4. Brush the tops of the eclairs with apricot puree.

  5. Dip the eclairs in colored fondant 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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
Add structure and richness, and help the paste puff and set as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the starch framework that holds the paste's shape once baked.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the paste.
Water
Creates steam as it heats, which lifts the paste and makes it hollow.

The step that matters

Cover the baking sheet with an upside-down tin and do not open it while baking. The enclosed space traps steam, which drives the puffing of the paste. Lifting the cover early releases the steam and the buns can collapse or stay flat.

“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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