The final week! This week we had the challenge of making eclairs.

I had never made eclairs before so I was a little nervous. Once again it was Pinterest which provided some good ideas for me and I ended up going with a Pistachio Eclair.

Not one to make things easy on myself, I made my eclairs from two different recipes.

For the choux pastry and the pistachio paste (for the cream) I followed the recipe from The Candid Appetite. It had a number of good tips on making eclairs as well, which I definitely took note of!

For the ganache and pistachio cream I turned to The Little Loaf.

Piping the eclairs was actually the hardest part, not making the choux pastry. As you can see mine looked a bit ugly. In piping it, I had to go over each many times, which caused a lot of cracks (and a lot of sore muscles the next day).

But when they came out of the oven they looked like really nice bread rolls.

With ganache and a sprinkling of pistachios these eclairs looked amazing.

I also had a few issues with the cream. First with making the pistachio paste – I don’t actually have a food processor, I only have one of those magic bullet things which didn’t do a very good job of blending the nuts. It resulted in quite a thick cream and also a few big chunks left in the mixture, which ultimately became a nightmare of piping the cream inside the eclairs. Basically, I couldn’t, due to pieces of pistachios getting stuck in the nozzle. I ended up having to cut them open and spoon the cream inside. After that, they looked a bit ugly.

I believe the cream was my undoing as the eclairs did not go down well with my colleagues. I came last this week. So I said goodbye to first place. I definitely want to try making eclairs again, but I think I will be doing a chocolate cream next time to appeal to the masses.

But overall I think I did pretty well, not having my own kitchen and all!

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