Passionfruit Cream Puffs #Recipe by @LibbyKlein

 Libby Klein I love cream puffs. They are very easy to make gluten free because the custard filling is thickened with corn starch, making it gluten free to begin with. This is the same recipe as my cream puff swans, only with the addition of tart passion fruit puree in the custard, and an easier method of making the shells.

You can make cute little puffs instead of the monster puffs I always seem to make. I tend to forget just how much these pouf when they bake. To make tiny bit sized puffs, your batter should be pipped or spooned smaller than a golf ball. They will double in size.

Passionfruit Cream Puffs

Yield: 12 large cream puffs

Choux Paste

Ingredients
1 stick (½ cup) unsalted butter
1 cup water
Hefty pinch salt
1 cup flour OR gluten-free flour blend that has xanthan gum already added
*if your gluten-free flour blend does NOT have Xanthan gum already added (like Bob’s Red Mill does not) add ½ teaspoon xanthan gum to the recipe
4 eggs

Passionfruit Pastry Cream

Ingredients

2 cups whole milk

4 egg yolks

1/2 cup sugar
5 Tbsp cornstarch
Heavy pinch salt

1/2 cup passionfruit puree, thawed if frozen

2 Tbsp butter

Later:
1 ½ cups heavy whipping cream
 

DIRECTIONS:

 Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F. In a heavy saucepan, add 1 stick of butter and 1 cup of water and bring to a boil. 

When the butter is melted, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the flour all at once, mixing quickly (the mixture will form a ball). Let it stand for a couple of minutes to cool a few degrees. Transfer to the bowl of your stand mixer. Using the paddle attachment, add the eggs to the flour mixture, one at a time until you have a silky dough. 

  

Scoop into small rounds on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Dip your fingertips into cold water and smooth the mounds of dough into pretty balls. They will puff us as they bake.

Bake at 375° F. for 30-35 minutes until golden brown. Poke a hole in the side of each one with a knife and put them back in the oven for 2 minutes. Take them out and let them cool.

Make the pastry cream.

In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, bring the milk to a simmer. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar, cornstarch, and salt.

Bring the mixture in the saucepan to a boil while stirring continuously. Continue to simmer until the mixture thickens. Remove from the heat and gradually whisk hot milk into the egg-yolk mixture a little at a time to bring up the temperature of the yolks. Add everything back into the saucepan and add the passionfruit puree. Cook over medium-low heat while whisking continuously until the custard is so thick it coats a spoon, like soft pudding. 

Now cook it until it boils for one minute. It will be very thick even while hot.

Remove from heat and stir in 2 Tbsp of butter. Transfer the custard to a shallow dish and cover it with plastic wrap down to the surface of the custard. Chill until the custard is completely cold. The plastic wrap won't even cling to the custard it's so thick.

In a separate bowl, beat the 1 ½ cups heavy whipping cream until stiff peaks form.

With a rubber spatula, fold a little of the whipped cream into the custard to loosen it up. 

Then fold all the custard into the whipped cream. Chill again until thick and stiff.

Now there are 2 ways to fill your cooled cream puffs. You can either slice them in half like hamburger buns and dollop pastry cream in the middle, or you can transfer the pastry cream into a piping bag – and using the hole you poked into them at the end of baking, squeeze pastry cream into the shell until it won’t take anymore. You’ll know it’s full because the shell will swell and the pastry cream with start to push back out. 

Top your cream puffs with a dusting of powdered sugar if desired. Leave me a comment and let me know what your favorite pastry is.

Layla Virtue, a blue-haired, 30-something recovering alcoholic and former cop is trying to reinvent herself as a musician—between AA meetings, dodging eccentric neighbors at her trailer park, and reconnecting with her mysterious dad—in this ​unforgettable new mystery brimming with hilarity and heart.

Layla is taking her new life one day at a time from the Lake Pinecrest Trailer Park she now calls home. Being alone is how she likes it. Simple. Uncomplicated. Though try telling that to the group of local ladies who are in relentless pursuit of Layla as their new BFF, determined to make her join them for coffee and donuts.

After her first career ended in a literal explosion, Layla’s trying to eke out a living as a rock musician. It’s not easy competing against garage bands who work for tacos and create their music on a computer, while all she has is an electric guitar and leather-ish pants. But Layla isn’t in a position to turn down any gig. Which is why she’s at an 8-year-old’s birthday party, watching as Chuckles the Clown takes a bow under the balloon animals. No one expects it will be his last . . .

Who would want to kill a clown—and why? Layla and her unshakable posse are suddenly embroiled in the seedy underbelly of the upper-class world of second wives and trust fund kids, determined to uncover what magnetic hold a pudgy, balding clown had over women who seem to have everything they could ever want. Then again, Layla knows full well that people are rarely quite what they seem—herself included . . .

Libby Klein writes ridiculously funny murder mysteries from her Northern Virginia office with a very naughty calico Persian named Miss Eliza Doolittle, and a sweet black Lab named Vader. She can name that tune for 70s and 80s rock in the first few notes, and she's translated her love of classic rock into her Layla Virtue Mysteries. Libby was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that prevents her from eating gluten without exploding. Because bread is one of her love languages, she includes the recipes for gluten free goodies in her Cape May based Poppy McAllister series. Most of her hobbies revolve around travel, and eating, and eating while traveling. She insists she can find her way to any coffee shop anywhere in the world, even while blindfolded. Follow all of her nonsense on her website www.LibbyKleinBooks.com/Newsletter/

Gluten-Free Cream Puff Swans #Recipe by @LibbyKlein

 

 Libby Klein I used to make cream puffs all the time back in the days before gluten was viciously cut out of my life due to my auto-immune disease. They’re a dessert that WOWs people because they look so fancy and complicated. I’d see frozen ones at functions and parties all the time and sigh with self-pity that I couldn’t have them anymore. Why it never occurred to me to just try to make them gluten-free I’ll never know. I finally gave into temptation after watching a cooking show where the pastry chef made a tart with vanilla pastry cream, mmm - Pastry cream, and I’m so glad I did. These are wonderful for a Mother's Day Brunch, or a fancy Shower or Tea Party. And they're easier than they look.

Disclaimer - Read all your labels to make sure your ingredients are gluten-free. Gluten can be sneaky.

Gluten-Free Cream Puffs

Yield: 12 large cream puffs

 Choux Paste (sounds like Shoe paste) – a most intimidating sounding recipe - is actually very easy. I recommend using a big wooden spoon for this. And if you are making the swans, you'll need a piping bag with a number 8 or 10 circle tip.

 

INGREDIENTS:

1 stick (½ cup) unsalted butter

1 cup water

Hefty pinch salt

1 cup gluten-free flour blend that has xanthan gum already added

*if your gluten-free flour blend does NOT have Xanthan gum already added (like Bob’s Red Mill does not) add ½ teaspoon xanthan gum to the recipe

4 eggs

Vanilla Pastry Cream:

 INGREDIENTS:

¾ cup sugar

¼ cup cornstarch

Heavy pinch salt

1 ½ cups whole milk – Not skim milk. 

    If you’re making pastry with skim milk you don’t deserve cream puffs.

6 egg yolks

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract - or scrape one vanilla bean

Later:

1 ½ cups heavy whipping cream

 

DIRECTIONS:

 Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F. In a heavy saucepan, add 1 stick of butter and 1 cup of water and bring to a boil. 

When the butter is melted, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the flour all at once, mixing quickly (the mixture will form a ball). Let it stand for a couple of minutes to cool a few degrees.

Add the eggs to the flour mixture, one at a time, mixing well with a wooden spoon after each addition. 

Transfer a large scoop of dough into your fitted pastry bag. Pipe 8 question marks onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet. On a separate cookie sheet, drop the rest of the dough by large heaping tablespoons forming 6-8 mounds. I usually pipe a couple extra swan necks just in case things get hinky in the assembly.

Dip your fingertips into cold water and smooth the mounds of dough into pretty balls. They will puff us as they bake but they won’t smooth out like dinner rolls.

Bake the necks at 375° F. for 10-12 minutes, or until nicely golden. Bake the domes for 30-35 minutes until golden brown. Poke a hole in the side of each one with a knife and put them back in the oven for 2 minutes. Take them out and let them cool.

Make the pastry cream filling.

In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, bring the sugar, milk, cornstarch, and salt to a simmer. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks.

Bring the mixture in the saucepan to a boil while stirring continuously. Continue to simmer until the mixture thickens. Remove from the heat and gradually whisk hot milk into the egg-yolk mixture a little at a time to bring up the temperature of the yolks. Add everything back into the saucepan and cook over medium-low heat while whisking continuously until the custard is so thick it coats a spoon, like soft pudding. 

Now cook it until it boils for one minute. It will be very thick even while hot.

Remove from heat and stir in 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract or the vanilla beans. Transfer the custard to a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap down to the surface of the custard. Chill until the custard is completely cold. The plastic wrap won't even cling to the custard it's so thick.

In a separate bowl, beat the 1 ½ cups heavy whipping cream until stiff peaks form.

With a rubber spatula, fold a little of the whipped cream into the custard to loosen it up. 

Then fold all the custard into the whipped cream. Chill again until thick and stiff.

Now there are 2 ways to fill your cooled cream puffs. You can either slice them in half like hamburger buns and dollop pastry cream in the middle, or you can transfer the pastry cream into a piping bag – and using the hole you poked into them at the end of baking, squeeze pastry cream into the shell until it won’t take anymore. (Yikes.) You’ll know it’s full because the shell will swell and the pastry cream with start to push back out. In my opinion, this is the best way to fill gluten-free cream puffs because the doughy center will absorb the cream. But today, we are making swans.

If you're making the swans, cut the top off each cream puff round. Cut that top in half longways. That makes the wings. Fill the bottom with pastry cream like it's the swan boat to the tunnel of love. Set your swan neck into the pastry cream and butterfly out your wings.

Top your cream puffs with a dusting of powdered sugar if desired. Then pose them in front of a Swan Princess background like this.

 

B&B owner and gluten-free baker Poppy McAllister, along with her saucy Aunt Ginny, is on the case at the annual Cold Spring Village antique show in Libby Klein’s seventh deliciously witty, paleo-themed Poppy McAllister Mystery.
 

When vintage items go up for auction, gluten-free baker and B&B owner Poppy McAllister discovers some people will pay the ultimate price...
 
It’s peak summer season at the Butterfly House Bed and Breakfast in Cape May, with tourists fluttering in and out and wreaking enough havoc to rival a Jersey Shore hurricane. Also back in town is Courtney Whipple and his family of antique dealers for the annual Cold Spring Village antique show. Courtney’s son Auggie has a unique piece he believes will fetch them a fortune if he can get it authenticated in time—a piece rival dealer Grover Prickle insists was stolen from his store.
 
Poppy and her Aunt Ginny attend the auction, hoping to bid on an armoire for the B&B, and discover a veritable armory for sale—everything from ancient blades and nineteenth-century guns to such potential killing devices as knitting needles and a blacksmith hammer. Strangely, they don’t see either Auggie or Grover—or the mysterious item they both claim to own. Then during the auction, a body falls out of the very armoire Poppy was hoping to acquire, stabbed through the heart. Now, surrounded by competitive dealers and makeshift weapons, she must find out who turned the auction house into a slaughterhouse…
 

Libby Klein grew up in Cape May, NJ where she attended high school in the '80s. Her

classes revolved mostly around the Culinary sciences and Drama, with one brilliant semester in Poly-Sci that may have been an accident. She loves to drink coffee, bake gluten-free goodies, collect fluffy cats, and translate sarcasm for people who are too serious. She writes from her Northern Virginia office where she serves a very naughty black smoke Persian named Sir Figaro Newton. You can keep up with her shenanigans by signing up for her Mischief and Mayhem Newsletter on her website. www.LibbyKleinBooks.com/Newsletter/

Gougere

by Sheila Connolly

I kind of backed into this recipe. You see, it’s fiddlehead season. If you’re not familiar with fiddleheads, they are the tender tips of emerging ferns, still tightly coiled. They’re available for a very short time each spring. They taste a bit like asparagus, with a nice crunch.

The thing is, there’s not much you can do with them, if you want to enjoy their delicacy and freshness: simply saute/steam them with a little butter.

So, while contemplating my pound of fresh fiddleheads, I tried to come up with a complementary recipe for something, and I landed on gougère. That’s a fancy word for a pastry made of pâte à choux. Not any clearer? Think cream puff dough. I was first introduced to gougère by Julia Child, many years ago. Most often they are made by the spoonful, which produces a hollow crispy pastry that you can fill with either a sweet or savory filling. The dough is easy and fun to make.

But I wanted a single dish, not a fiddly (ha, a pun) bunch of little things. So I had to go hunting, and found one that was kinda, sorta what I wanted, so I started fine-tuning it. And voila! Here is my companion dish to the fiddleheads!

Gougère with mushrooms and ham

Pâte à Choux:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

 

1 cup flour

Pinch each of salt and pepper

1 cup water

1/2 cup butter

4 eggs

1/8 lb sharp Cheddar cheese, diced (about 1/4 inch cubes)

Mix the flour, salt and pepper together. Heat the water and butter in a large saucepan until the butter melts.

Bring the liquid to a boil. Add the flour mixture all at once and stir vigorously (most sources suggest a sturdy wooden spoon for this) until it comes together in an elastic ball. This should take about a minute.

Allow the mixture to cool for about 5 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well with that wooden spoon after each one.

Stir in the diced cheese.

  

Filling: (actually I made the filling first, because it can sit while you make the dough)

4 Tblsp butter

1 medium onion, chopped

1/2 lb mushrooms, sliced

1-1/2 Tblsp flour

1/2 tsp salt

Freshly grated pepper

1 cup chicken broth, heated

6 ounces cooked ham, chopped

1 Tblsp Cheddar cheese, shredded

Melt the butter in a large skillet. Saute the onion over low-medium heat until soft but not browned. Add the mushrooms and cook for another 2 minutes.

Sprinkle the flour, salt and pepper and cook for an additional 2 minutes. Add the chicken broth and mix well. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove the sauce from the heat and add the ham. Taste for seasoning.

Butter a 10- or 11-inch ovenproof skillet or shallow baking dish. Spoon the pâte à choux in a ring around the edge, leaving a hole in the center. 

Spoon the filling into the center. Sprinkle the shredded cheese over the whole thing.

Bake in the preheated oven for 40 minutes or until the gougère is crisp and puffy and the filling is bubbling.

Serve at once, cut into wedges (it kind of goes splat once you cut into it, but it tastes good!. Along with your fiddleheads!

At last! Privy to the Dead, available everywhere! You can finally find out what's in that hole in the basement of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society. (Don't worry, it won't turn your stomach.)

Find it at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Indiebound

Ooh La La Cream Puffs

Have you met author Heather Blake? I've never seen her without a smile. You might be familiar with some of her books since Heather also writes under the name Heather Webber. She's the author of over a dozen novels. She's a Dr Pepper enthusiast, total homebody who loves to be close to her family, read, watch Reality TV (totally addicted, especially to competition shows), crochet, occasionally leave the house to hike the beautiful mountains in the northeast, bake (mostly cookies) and dreams of owning a house at the base of Mt. Mansfield in Stowe, VT. Heather grew up in a suburb of Boston, but currently, she lives in the Cincinnati area with her family and is hard at work on her next book.


Her latest book A Witch Before Dying hits the stores officially on August 7th.

When Darcy is hired by Elodie Keaton to clean up her missing mother’s disorderly home, the Wishcrafter is certainly up for the task. After all, the motto of her Aunt Ve’s personal concierge service As You Wish is “No Job Impossible.” But beneath the piles of old newspapers and knickknacks, Darcy discovers something much more disturbing: Patrice Keaton’s body.

Darcy’s determined to give Elodie peace of mind by investigating her mother’s disappearance and death. Patrice was last seen over a year ago after a fight with her Charmcrafter boyfriend. Was her murder a crime of passion? Or were Patrice’s troubles caused by the Anicula, a wish-granting amulet? Now Darcy has to find not only a killer but also the Anicula— before the power of ultimate wish fulfillment falls into the wrong hands…

Read more about Heather at www.heatherblakebooks.com .

And now -- Heather!

Back in the spring, my daughter came home from school with a specific assignment for her high school French class: She had to make a French recipe.

Of course, I volunteered to help because as I have a French character in my latest mystery series (Pepe, the mouse familiar from my Wishcraft mysteries), I felt as though I was fully qualified.

However, my daughter being the good girl she is opted to do the project on her own, though she graciously allowed me to be her sous chef (I can measure flour like no one’s business).

She pored over various recipes and ended up making something that we’re quite fond of in our family: Cream puffs! Light and crisp pastry shells that have a yummy filling. Fillings can be anything you choose, from savory to sweet. She opted to use our family’s vanilla custard filling for her assignment.

There are many recipes for cream puffs out there—all very similar. Here’s hers:

Pastry:

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup flour

1/4 tsp. salt

2 eggs at room temperature

Preheat oven to 375˚. In a medium pot, combine the water and the butter and bring it to a boil. Remove it from the heat and dump in the flour, stirring until it’s all combined. Let it cool for a couple of minutes before returning it to the heat (on medium) and stir constantly until a dough ball forms. One at a time, add the eggs, and stir briskly until the dough is nice and smooth (great arm workout!). 

Place rounded tablespoons of dough on an ungreased cookie sheet (which can be lined with parchment if you prefer), 2-3 inches apart. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until the pastry is nice and golden brown. During the last few minutes of baking, you can poke one or two holes in the dough with a toothpick to let steam escape and prevent puffs from collapsing (she didn’t do this and her puffs were fine). 

After cooling, cut the top part of the puff off (save it!), remove some of the doughy insides (they look like strings), and fill the pastry with your favorite filling. Then replace the top (like a little hat).

***You can adjust the dough amount depending on what size puff you prefer. Small bite-sized puffs are great for appetizers.

Yield depends on size of the puffs. My daughter’s batch made twenty.

Vanilla Custard Filling (can be easily doubled):

1 cup milk

1/2 cup granulated sugar

3 Tbs. flour

1/4 tsp. salt

2 egg yolks

2 tsp. vanilla extract

In a small bowl, combine sugar, flour, and salt

In another small bowl, combine egg yolks, beating gently to combine

On medium heat, warm milk in a pot until you start to see steam rising. Slowly whisk in the sugar, flour, salt mix. Stir until the mixture thickens, about five minutes. Remove a teaspoon of the mix and slowly temper it into the egg yolks, then slowly whisk the egg yolk mixture into the custard. Continue to cook for another five minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat and add the vanilla. Transfer into a bowl and let cool for ten minutes before placing a layer of plastic wrap over the top of the custard (actually touching the custard—this prevents skin from forming) and refrigerate until completely cool—a few hours. 

***A quick and easy substitute for vanilla custard is to use instant vanilla pudding.

You can dust the top of your cream puff with confectioner’s sugar or drizzle with chocolate.

Bon appetit!

 

Voila!