HOW TO MAKE PATE A CHOUX, PROFITEROLES, OR ECCLERES
Pate a choux is an airy, egg-flavored, small cake that is often filled with some nice creams. Pate a choux is actually a name for the dough from which you can make profiteroles or eccleres - they use the very same dough, but they just have a different shape. Profiteroles are like small balls, while eccleres are long cakes.
Making of pate a choux is not very difficult, although it is different from the "common" cake making procedures. The sign of a good pate a choux is a cake that rises well in the oven and remains risen to a good degree even after baking. It should also be golden brown, hollow in the center, and have a strong taste of eggs. The center of a pate a choux should also be fairly dry, although some moisture is acceptable (it is not easy nor necessary to completely dry out the inner core of the cookie, as it is usually filled in with a moist cream). To make a pate a choux, there are several guidelines to follow.
Recipes (like the one below) use a mix of milk and water in the dough. This is to balance the influence of each of the ingredients on the final product. More milk will give a faster browning of pate a choux in the oven, which could lead to overbrowning or burned surface well before the inner part of the cake becomes fairly dry. For this reason, water is mixed with milk to slow down the browning reaction and allow for the cake to dry more easily. Another ingredient that's important to consider is flour. Common white flour is good to use, although if you can get a white bread flour (actually the one that is made of the whole grain but it looks white with some black speckles in it) then your dough will contain more gluten proteins. More gluten means that more water will be absorbed and then you can add more eggs to the dough to make it more egg-flavored. Gluten is also an elastic protein, and it will allow for a better stretch of the pate a choux in the oven.
One last thing to remember is that the oven temperature that you start baking the cakes in is set at 200 C/392 F, but as soon as you see the initial browning of the cakes you can decrease the temperature to 150 C/300 F, so the browning effect will be slowed down while allowing the heat to penetrate the inner part of the pate a choux and dry it before the browning becomes too intense.
With these points in mind, here's a recipe for a nice pate a choux:
First, siften 150 g/5 oz flour into a bowl and add 1/2 tsp of salt. In a pot, mix 120 mL/4 fl oz milk with 200 mL/7 fl oz water and dissolve a big pinch of sugar in it. Turn up the heat, throw in 100 g/3 oz of butter, let it melt and bring everything to a rolling boil. Turn off the heat, add the flour and salt and quickly turn this into a dough. Work the dough (using a wooden spoon) until it is not sticking to the pot anymore. Then put the dough into a bowl and let it cool down. Preheat the oven (200 C/392 F). When the dough is cool, add about 4 eggs to it - one by one - and mix each egg into the dough until it all becomes smooth, before adding a new egg. The final texture of the dough should be smooth and fairly thick - you should be able to shape the dough on a greaseproof paper without it collapsing. Then, do exactly that, preferably using a piping bag - pipe small portions of the dough on a greaseproof paper for profiteroles and long stretches of dough for eccleres. Make sure there is a good amount of space between the cakes as they will grow in size dramatically. If you need to trim the cakes, use a wet finger or wet spoon to do that. Bake the cakes for about 20 minutes, or until they are golden brown. As mentioned above, you can reduce the heat for the last 5-10 minutes if necessary. You can bake a test cake first if you need to determine the optimal baking conditions. When the cakes are baked remove them from the heat and put them onto a wire rack to cool down. That's it! Then you can use some good creams and chocolate sauces to flavor your pate a choux pastries.