Choux Pastries for Parties and Gifts

Choux is the strangest thing in a pastry kitchen. It is cooked on the hob before it goes anywhere near an oven, it looks wrong at every stage, and it rises without any raising agent at all.

It is also the most fragile thing we sell, and understanding why explains most of the advice about how to order it.

How it actually works

Water and butter are brought to the boil, flour is tipped in all at once, and the mixture is beaten over the heat until it forms a smooth ball that comes away from the pan. This gelatinises the starch in the flour, and it is the first cooking.

Off the heat, eggs are beaten in one at a time until the paste reaches a consistency that is judged by eye and by feel rather than by weight. Too stiff and it will not rise. Too loose and it spreads flat on the tray. There is no reliable measurement for this, which is why choux is the thing that most obviously separates people who have made a lot of pastry from people who have not.

The paste is piped and baked. In the oven, the water in it turns to steam, the steam inflates the gelatinised starch, and the whole thing puffs into a hollow shell. There is no yeast and no baking powder. It rises on steam alone.

Then it has to dry out. A bun taken from the oven while the inside is still damp will collapse within a minute of hitting cool air, and the only fix is to leave it in longer than instinct suggests, which is a nerve wracking thing to do to something that already looks done.

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Why it has to be filled late

A baked choux shell is crisp and hollow. The moment a wet filling goes inside, the shell begins absorbing moisture from it.

Within two or three hours it has softened noticeably. Within a day it is a damp shell with cream in it, still perfectly edible and no longer the thing it was meant to be.

There is no way around this. Stabilised fillings slow it a little at the cost of the filling. Some places fill choux to order in front of you, which is the correct answer and only works if you have a counter.

We fill as late as we can manage before a delivery goes out, which means the buns arriving at your door are usually a couple of hours old. That is about as good as it gets outside a patisserie, and it is why we say plainly that choux should be eaten on the day.

What we make

Madagascan vanilla choux, in three sizes. Six for £16, nine for £24, twelve for £30.

The filling is Madagascan vanilla cream, and in something this plain the vanilla is most of what you taste. With only pastry and cream involved there is nowhere for a cheap vanilla to hide, and the difference between a good one and an extract is immediate.

The larger boxes work out better per piece, so if you are feeding a group, twelve is the sensible order.

Choux pastry rings with tvorog cream, four for £30.

The same pastry piped as rings and filled with a cream made from tvorog, the fresh curd cheese used throughout Eastern European baking. Tvorog is tangier than whipped cream and holds more structure, so the filling stays put instead of squeezing out of the far end, and the whole thing is noticeably less sweet.

People who find standard cream buns cloying tend to get on with these. They are also the more traditional of the two, and the one that gets ordered by people who grew up with them.

Ordering choux for a party

Order for the day, not the day before. This is the opposite of our advice for cakes. Almost everything else we make is fine or better after a night in the fridge. Choux is not.

Work out the timing of the event. If food goes out at seven, a morning delivery is fine. If it is an all day table, choux is the wrong thing entirely and cookies or Florentines will serve you far better at four in the afternoon.

Count generously. Choux buns are small and people take two without thinking about it. For twenty people at a drinks party, twelve is not enough and twenty four is about right.

They need no cutlery, which is their great advantage at a standing event. Nobody has to cut anything, nobody needs a plate, and the last one looks like the first.

Keep them cold and flat until service. A box of choux in a warm room for two hours is a box of softened choux.

When not to order them

If the food has to sit out for more than about three hours.

If it is going somewhere hot.

If it has to be posted, taken on a long journey or held overnight.

If you need something that will still be good tomorrow, in which case the cookies, Florentines or truffles are what you want.

The other thing choux is good for

Height on a table.

A dessert table made entirely of flat things looks like a supermarket display, and the usual fix is a cake stand, which mostly moves the problem upwards. Choux buns do something better, because a pile of them has volume and irregularity and reads as generous in a way that a neat arrangement never does.

For that reason, if you are laying out a table with several things on it, twelve choux in a mound near the middle will do more for how it looks than anything else on our list at the same price. It is a slightly cynical reason to order pastry and it happens to be true.

Ordering

Choux needs 48 hours notice like everything else, and it should be ordered for the day you plan to serve it.

Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 across the rest of London and Surrey, which covers all London postcodes and a good deal of Surrey, Kent and the Home Counties. There is a £50 minimum on orders, so a box of six at £16 travels alongside something else. A box of twelve at £30 plus a cake is a common order for a party, and it covers both the people who want a slice and the people who want something they can hold.