My heaven on a plate: Profiteroles with a Double-Creamy Blue-Cheese Filling

Wicked, decadent and sinful hardly begin to describe these dreamy little puffs, which are so packed with calories that you might as well skip eating them and strap them directly to your thighs and bottom*. But hell, Christmas is coming, so why not go ahead and indulge? Besides - if you're in my frame of mind (and body) - there are going to be slim pickings indeed come January.

This recipe, which I finally wrestled to the floor last week after several failed attempts, is all wound up with my personal history as a devoted lover of food.

Let me explain. Do you remember something utterly delicious that you ate as a child or teenager; something that turned your knees to jelly and filled your eyes with tears? I had two such tasting epiphanies in my early years.

The second was when I tasted Boursin cheese with garlic on a trip to Paris when I was fifteen (but more about that in a future post). The first, also involving cheese, was a few years earlier, when I reached into the fridge and sunk my teeth into a little puffy ball filled with a chilled, creamy mixture that tasted, frankly, of heaven. I believe I might have given out a low whimper: there were choirs of angels, and beams of celestial light fell through the kitchen windows.

Okay, I exaggerate, but the memory of tasting those little beauties remains as clear as day.

I reached back into the fridge, and had another one. And another. And another. Within a few minutes, I'd demolished most of the savoury profiteroles my mother had bought for some special occasion. She was furious with me: 'How could you eat so many?' she asked. 'You might have left one or two for the rest of us!'

'I just couldn't help myself, Ma,' I told her, wiping the crumbs off my bulging cheeks, and that was the honest truth.

My mum hasn't any memory of this event, so she was not able to help when I asked her if she recalled what was in those little puffs. At that tender age, I didn't have a library of tastes to draw upon, so in recreating the recipe I've had to take a guess, using my more experienced adult palate.

And, do you know what? I believe that what I was tasting was either blue cheese, or camembert, or very likely both.

In my most recent attempts, I've tried a combination of creamy blue cheese and camembert, and I've also tried using Brie. The mixture tasted right, but the the filling was a little oily and stiff. So I've abandoned the camembert, and come up with a silken mixture of blue cheese, cream cheese and whipped cream that is as close as I think I'll ever get.

I presume that whoever created these intended them to be served at room temperature, with a crispy outer shell and a soft and fluffy filling. But, for me, these are perfect eaten cold, somewhat soggy on the outside, and straight from the fridge. With bulging cheeks.

As choux pastry is quite tricky to get right, I've given detailed instructions below. Please measure the ingredients exactly (and see Cook's Notes, below).

For best results, a good-quality creamy blue cheese and a thick, full-fat cream cheese are essential. I used Lancewood's lovely plain cream cheese, and a Simonsberg creamy blue.




Profiteroles with a Double-Creamy Blue-Cheese Filling

For the profiteroles:
1 cup (250 ml) cake flour
a large pinch of salt
125 g salted butter (this is a quarter of a 500-gram block of butter)
1 cup (250 ml) water
4 extra-large free range eggs

For the filling:
130 g creamy blue cheese
1 cup (250 ml) whipping [single] cream
one tub (240 g) full-fat cream cheese, at room temperature
freshly milled black pepper

First make the profiteroles.

Preheat the oven to 180º C. Line a baking sheet with a piece of greaseproof paper. Sift the flour and salt into a little bowl, or onto a sheet of paper. Put the butter and the water into a large saucepan and set over a brisk heat. When the mixture begins to boil rapidly, remove the pan from the heat. Immediately tip the sifted flour and salt, all in one go, into the butter/water mixture. Stir energetically with a wooden spoon, and return to the heat. Turn down the heat and cook, stirring vigorously and continuously, for one to two minutes, or until the mixture forms a ball that comes cleanly away from the sides of the pan.

Take the pan off the heat and allow to cool for five minutes, or until just warm to the touch. Now beat in the whole eggs, one at a time, beating hard after each addition. Once you've added the fourth egg, you should have a glossy and thick - though slightly slack - mixture. Pile the mixture into a large piping bag fitted with a big plain nozzle, and pipe blobs the size of a litchi onto the baking paper (or use a teaspoon to make neat little dollops).

Put the baking sheet into the hot oven and bake for 25-35 minutes (depending on the ferocity of your oven) until well risen, golden brown and crisp. Turn off the oven, open the door, and allow the profiteroles to dry out for 10 minutes. Remove the profiteroles from the oven and turn them onto their sides. Use a piping nozzle (or the handle-end of a wooden spoon) to poke a hole into the bottom of each one. Set aside to cool completely.


In the meantime make the filling. Crumble the blue cheese into a saucepan, and add half (125 ml) of the cream. Place over a gentle flame and heat through, stirring often as the cheese melts. Do not allow to boil. When all the cheese has melted, remove the pan from the heat and set aside to cool for a few minutes.

Place the cream cheese in a large bowl, add the warm blue cheese mixture and, using a metal spoon, stir furiously until the mixture is smooth and well combined. Whip the remaining half-cup (125 ml) of cream to a soft peak, then stir it lightly into the blue cheese mixture. If the mixture seems a little stiff, don't worry: persist with gentle stirring, and it will all come together Season with a few grindings of black pepper. Cover and set aside, at room temperature.

Wash and dry your piping bag and fit a medium nozzle to it. Fill the piping bag with the blue cheese mixture. Poke the nozzle into the underside of each profiterole and squeeze in just enough of the cheese mixture to fill the cavity.

Serve immediately with a dab of wine jelly. Or - please trust me on this - put them in the fridge for a couple of hours, or until the filling is firm.

Makes 12 large profiteroles, or 18 small ones


Cook's Notes

• Choux pastry, although easy to make, is a little temperamental, and you can really only learn from experience when the batter is of a perfect consistency. Much depends on the flour you're using and the size of your eggs. Measure all the ingredients exactly, and follow the instructions above to the letter.
• If your first batch of choux pastry doesn't turn out well, don't be discouraged. Try again!  Perfect choux buns are light and crispy, hollow on the inside, and have a soft golden-brown colour.  

* With apologies to a friend of my sister's, who came up with the idea of strapping fatty foods directly to your backside.

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Leaf-Wrapped Wine-Soused Camembert, over the coals

Soaked in wine overnight, then flavoured with herbs and garlic, these little cheeses are wrapped in green leaves, tied with string and grilled over hot coals until the cheese has liquefied. This is a great warm-up snack for a braai [barbeque]: put them on at the same time as the meat (they take only a few minutes to cook) and then pass them around with a pile of crisps or salty crackers while you finish cooking the steaks.

You can flavour these cheeses with anything you like - I used thyme and garlic - and any large, fresh, flexible leaf will do as a wrapping: fig leaves, spinach leaves, banana leaves, beetroot greens, or even a robust lettuce leaf. (Here I used mustard greens, which grow like weeds in containers in my garden). Don't worry about the leaves catching fire: their moisture prevents them from charring too quickly.  By the time they've blackened at the edges, the cheese will have collapsed into a herby goo.

 

This, I might add, is the only dish that I've so far managed to cook successfully on my brand-new, super-duper, Taj Mahal of a braai-and-pizza oven.  I fired up the new braai on Sunday for the first time, partly because I'd laid my hands on a beautiful slab of fresh tuna, straight off a fishing boat, but also because I wanted to road-test my new grid. This grid, which I asked a local ironsmith to make, has a cunning feature: a third of the total space is covered by a removable double-decker section. This is designed, first, to keep food hot, and second to allow slow-cooking meat (such as chicken) to finish off at its own pace. The grid and its upper storey worked very well; the tuna steaks, on the other hand, were... um.... well,  they were deliciously, spankingly fresh, but they overcooked in a matter of minutes, welding themselves so resolutely to the new and shining grid that I started hunting for a crowbar.

Clearly, there is a long way to go before I get this outdoor cooking arena working perfectly.  (And the pizza oven?  Oh, please don't mention the bloody pizza oven.  I fired it up once, and the results were dismal.  The wood burned out too quickly, the oven didn't get hot enough, and the pizzas were floppy, stodgy and riddled with concrete dust. Certain members of my family were so disgusted with their 'pizzas' that they dumped them in the bin. Some gave scornful snorts at my bourgeois efforts to own a pizza oven. But that's another story.)

Thank goodness for the cheese.

Leaf-Wrapped Wine-Soused Camembert, Cooked over the Coals
4 small, just-ripe Camembert cheeses
250 ml (1 cup) white wine
2 T (30 ml) olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
12 large, fresh green leaves (see notes above)
a few sprigs of fresh thyme, or herbs of your choice
salt and milled black pepper

The day before you want to braai the cheeses (or at least six hours in advance), use a sharp knife to slice off the top layer of rind, removing about 2mm.  Put the cheeses, and the sliced-off rinds, into a shallow dish. Prick holes, using a fork, all over the soft upper surfaces of the cheeses. Mix together the wine, olive oil and crushed garlic, and pour the mixture over the cheeses.  Cover with cling film and set aside in a cool place.  Turn the cheeses once or twice while they marinate.

Soak 1.5 metres of string in cold water ten minutes.  Remove any large, stiff stalks from the leaves.  Place two leaves, crosswise, on your counter top.  Place a wheel of cheese on top.  Drizzle some of the marinade over the cheese, top with a few sprigs of thyme, season with salt and pepper, and cover with the sliced-off 'lid' of rind.

 

Place another leaf on top. Cut off a 40-cm length of wet string and slide it under the bottom-most leaf.  Gather the edges of the leaves up into a parcel, pleating and tucking as you go, and secure it by knotting the string around it in six 'spokes'  (see picture, left.) Don't worry if the parcel is scruffy: as long as there are no gaping holes, your cheese is safe. Repeat the process with the remaining cheeses.

Place the parcels over hot coals, face down, for about three minutes, or until the top of the parcel is browned. Before the cheese melts completely, flip over the parcel, using a spatula, and allow the underside to cook for another three to five minutes  (depending on the heat of your coals). The very instant you see cheese seeping from the parcel, it's ready. Serve immediately.

Serves 8. http://whatsforsupper-juno.blogspot.com/2009/08/spring-salad-of-edamane-beans-fennel.html

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