the chocolate eclair

Posted on | July 5, 2010 | 6 Comments

when i was a child, back in auckland, when the earth’s crust was still cooling….my mother worked next door to a weird underground coffee bar.
literally underground.
once you got there though, they had chocolate eclairs.
these were feather-light tubes of choux pastry, filled with chantilly cream, and lavished with a coating of sticky, sweet, soft, smooth chocolate icing.
in a word…divine.

now, fast forward twenty years or so, to cairns, australia and me standing salivating in a new euro-style patisserie in town and i spot them! choc eclairs!
i’ll have one of those.
imagine the crushing disappointment when i bite into the thing, expecting the luscious softness i remembered so well, and instead my teeth crash against a thick layer of solid dark chocolate of a particularly rock hard type.
a long thick smear of solid chocolate.
and not good chocolate either, gentle reader.
o no, the kind of chocolate that leaves a disgusting greasy layer on the roof of your mouth, if you are lucky enough to get the damned stuff to even melt.
usually it just cracks into smaller bits and you chew it down…and the cream inside the eclair is squirting out and all the textures are wrong wrong wrong.

so, for the last 20 years in australia, i’ve been consistently served up these filthy eclairs to the point where i just wearily quit ordering them.
i began to wonder if the perfect eclair of my youth was just a hazy dream, along the lines of “fruit used to taste so much better when i was a child” and “summer used to last for months and months and months”.

yesterday, my faith was restored.
my husband has found a fantastic little patissierie/boulangerie in epernay.
he noticed a queue outside on sunday morning, then when he drove back a few hours later, there was still a queue.
on a third pass, they were still queueing, so he decided to stop and get in the queue too.
this is a man who will.not.queue.for.anything.
except pastry.
the bread he turned up with was so fabulous and his descriptions of the other goodies were so vivid, that he had no trouble luring me into the queue also.

i spotted the eclairs from the street.
by the time i got to the front of the queue, i had my order alllllll ready.
i ate that eclair in the car on the way home and it was perfect.
it was even a slight improvement on the auckland eclairs because it was filled with some light chocolatey custard pastry cream type confection, instead of sweetened whipped cream.
you know, so you can eat more of them before you feel sick.
the chocolate icing on top was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

so take heed, australian patissiers.
U are doin’ it RONG.
get that ghastly solid chocolate out of there and learn how to make sticky soft chocolate icing.
and make our lives worth living.

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hi, i'm patti flynn

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