The Taste of Childhood

For New Year’s, I gifted myself a book: Baking According to All-Union Standards. It is a collection of recipes of various baked goods that were made and served at state-owned delicatessens, school canteens, restaurants, cafes and bakeries all around the Soviet Union, when All-Union standards were still a thing.

I can’t say that I have a lot of memories connected to any of the baked goods described in the book, because in our neck of the woods we didn’t have bakeries, restaurants, state-owned delicatessens or anything of that sort. There were some biscuits called коржики that you could sometimes get at the school canteen, but they were a rare occurrence. Such things as the famed Kievsky Cake, made mostly out of meringue, or the richly chocolate Praha layered cake from Moscow’s Praha Restaurant were out of reach. You could sometimes buy the Soviet version of the qurabiya biscuit in the store, but that was about it.

Not that I had any reason to complain – my mother was (and is) a wonderful cook and baker, and the stuff that she baked was ten times better than anything store-bought. Still, the book and its recipes held some sort of allure, and so I decided to start studying it by replicating the only recipe I knew, that of the коржики, because at least with them I knew what they should look and taste like.

Well, this story doesn’t end as might think. I followed the recipe to the letter, but the result was, while quite tasty, nowhere near my recollections of the original. I gave them to my parents to try and they, too, had to agree that these weren’t like the originals. Whether it had to do with anything in the recipe or whether the ingredients we use today differ so much from the ones that were used in my childhood, or whether it all comes down to mass production and food just tasting different when it’s homemade, I don’t know. Still, I didn’t want to share the recipe that I wasn’t 100 percent happy with.

So, instead, I share another recipe from my childhood (and one that was served in restaurants and cafes) – but courtesy of my mother, not the recipe book. It’s called cream puffs (профитроли in Russian, aka profitoroles) and involves a choux pastry and a simple custard cream.

When I was small, this delicacy was a rare guest in our house, because my mother was wary of the choux pastry and considered it something too cumbersome to make (she held the same opinion about meringues, but I imagine it had something to do with the lack of a good mixer). So, without further ado, here’s the classic cream puffs recipe.

Cream Puffs

Pastry

Flour – 120 g (1 cup)
Butter – 100 g (3.5 oz)
Water – 200 ml (~5/6 cup)
Eggs – 3-4
Salt – 0.5 tsp

Cream

2 eggs
1 cup white sugar
3 tbsp flour
0.5 l (just over 2 cups) of milk

Pour water in a saucepan, salt it and then add the butter.

Heat the water until all the butter dissolves, stirring all the while. Bring to a boil.

Remove from the heat, but keep your flame/heat on, just turn it down a bit.

Add the flour, mixing vigorously, then return to the heat. Keep stirring for 1-2 minutes, until the dough starts turning into a ball.

Remove from the heat, and place the dough in the bowl of a stand mixer (or use a hand-held one or a food processor). Allow it to cool for a few minutes (you’ll be adding fresh eggs and don’t want them to cook from the heat of the dough).

Once the dough has cooled, so it’s no longer scalding hot, start mixing or processing. After about a minute, start adding the eggs one by one and mixing the dough thoroughly between each addition.

Depending on the size of your eggs, it’s quite possible that you’ll only need three – and will see the dough come together nicely (with four, the dough might become too liquid, and your puffs will spread more than they should).

Once the dough has come together, use either a piping bag or a tablespoon to place individual mounds of choux pastry on a parchment-covered baking sheet.

Bake at 375° F for about 30 minutes.

Now make your custard cream.  

Mix together the eggs and sugar, then add the flour. Warm up milk in a saucepan, then ad the egg mixture to the warm milk. Return to the heat and bring to boil while stirring, then remove from the heat off. As the custard cools, it will become thicker.

Once the custard cream and the puffs have cooled down, use a pastry tube to fill the puffs with cream (it’s best not to cut the puffs in half, but to either find a cranny or make one around the pastry’s “waist”).

These are best eaten immediately, obviously. And if you are feeling especially indulgent, serve them with some sort of a liquid chocolate sauce or ganache.