Today I am inspired by the fresh eggs on our counter and the distant hint of spring in the air. Or maybe it's just my ridiculous Connecticut imagination and an urgent sense of longing for warmer weather. Either way, I love an excuse to make a cream puff. And though there are oodles of ways to take advantage of having local eggs at the ready and local berries on call in the freezer, I can't think of a better use for them together!
The first time my husband's co-worker approached my husband with a dozen of her just-collected eggs from her small family farm, she apologized, saying, "These do not come washed off, like they do in the store." My husband had laughed, as she apparently had not seen the eggs we lived on in Africa, purchased with feathers and poo as a standard requirement. We have done our best to assure her we never mind fresh local eggs! Local eggs are one of the easiest foods for a person to find year round from their region. Do a quick search wherever you are and you will surely be able to find small farms that love to get their eggs out to nearby families. But enough about eggs. This recipe is also about beautiful New-England-grown berries.
It's not hard to find local berries in the northeast in Spring or Summer. From strawberry season to blueberry, black berry, and raspberry picking time, there are plenty to go around! But come winter,when my freezer empties and the price of berries imported from places like Chili and Argentina are high, I like to mosey into the freezer aisle. Wyman's of Maine, a local berry supplier located in Milbridge, Maine, always has the best and most affordable products I can find in almost any grocery store. I love their Website, which is less about pumping themselves up and packed more with recipes, health articles, and nutrition facts that remind me just how awesome a super food like berries can be!Now, I am no food photog. And while I work on that, never mind my poorly-lit cream puffs. Just try a batch and you will not care about their hot looks (and really, they are gorgeous in person, I promise). Taste them and you might just say they are berry egg-cellent. (Sorry, couldn't control myself...) Enjoy!
Berry Cream Puffs
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. In a saucepan, heat on medium:
1 cup of water
1/2 cup of butter, or, to be dairy-free, Nutiva (a wonder product like butter but made of coconut and red palm oil)
Once all butter is melted (it may boil before this happens), add:
1 cup of flour (all-purpose gluten free flour works, too!)
Mix flour in while the pot is still on the heat. It will form into a ball in the middle of the pot when it is well mixed and heated. Once this happens, take off the heat and add:
4 eggs, added and mixed in one at a time
When the eggs are mixed in well and the batter is uniformly gooey, place piles of approx. 1/2 cup-sized worth of batter onto a baking sheet. Bake until lightly browned on the outside, about 15 -20 minutes depending on your oven.
Cool baked puffs. On a plate, cut open cooled puff by cutting off a lid (I liken this to carving a pumpkin- your lid should be slightly smaller than the diameter of the puff).
Scoop out some of the interior if desired (we like the eggy inside, so usually I just move it aside with clean fingers to make space for filling) and fill with whipped cream. My dairy-free family loves using So-Delicious Coconut whipped cream, a low-sugar alternative. But if you use milk-based whipped cream, it's another great opportunity to use a local product!
Spoon some delicious thawed berries on top of the whipped cream (some will roll out onto the plate and that is gorgeously okay!), then replace the "lid" of the puff. Sprinkle with a few puffs of powdered sugar for a professional look and a sweet touch. On a paper plate or in a fancy dish, this sweet treat is great all year round!
