Profiteroles with White Chocolate

Water, butter, flour, salt, eggs — nothing in choux is decorative. Butter's job is fat coating the flour's starch and protein, which slows gluten formation and gives you a paste rather than bread dough; it also carries flavour and helps the crust brown and crisp rather than just dry out. Any neutral, firm fat can replace it structurally, but butter's own taste is part of the point here, so don't reach for a flavourless substitute unless you have to. The eggs do three jobs at once: they loosen the cooked paste back to a pipeable consistency, they provide the protein network that sets the crust in the oven, and their moisture is a second source of the steam that inflates the shell. Four eggs is a working average — crack them in gradually and stop when the dough falls off the spoon in a thick, reluctant ribbon, because egg size varies and a too-wet dough won't hold a shape when piped.

Double cream appears twice, for different reasons. In the filling, whipped cream lightens pastry cream into something that pipes and eats soft, not stodgy. In the glaze, cream unmelted is just cream, but warmed until it's nearly boiling, it has enough heat to melt chopped chocolate into a stable emulsion without scorching it — chocolate seized straight over direct heat turns grainy, because cocoa solids and sugar don't like sudden, uneven heat, they like gentle and even. If you don't have double cream, any cream with enough fat to whip — above roughly 35% — will do the same job; thin cream won't hold shape and won't make a glaze that sets.

Egg yolks, sugar and cornflour together are what make the custard a crème pâtissière rather than a sweet sauce. Yolks give richness and some set; cornflour gives a stable set that survives folding, piping and a day in the fridge, where egg alone would break down. The cornflour must be sifted into the yolk-sugar mixture and not dumped in dry, or you get lumps that never fully hydrate and leave grit in the finished cream — that's the defect the sifting step is quietly preventing. Vanilla pod split into the hot milk infuses real vanillin oils that a splash of extract only approximates; use extract if you must, but expect a flatter flavour, not a worse one exactly, just thinner.

Dark chocolate melted into the hot custard turns it into a chocolate pastry cream without you having to cook a separate chocolate custard from scratch — the custard's own heat is enough to melt it, which is one less pan and one less chance to scorch something. White chocolate in the glaze is a different animal: it's mostly cocoa butter, sugar and milk solids with no cocoa mass, which is why it needs the food colouring if you want it properly white rather than the natural ivory it goes slightly yellow-cream from the cocoa butter and milk fats — purely cosmetic, skip it and nothing about the taste or set changes.

Some say profiteroles need a professional piping setup to look right. No — because the whole point of piling them into a pyramid under a poured glaze is that it hides unevenness. A disposable bag with the corner snipped off does the choux and the filling both; what actually matters is piping walnut-sized mounds of roughly even size, because wildly different sizes bake at different rates and you'll have some dry and some soggy out of the same tray.

This feeds eight as a proper dessert, more as a tea-table centrepiece next to the usual pot of tea with milk — a pyramid like this is built to be picked at, not portioned out in exact eighths, so treat the serving number as a rough guide to quantity, not a cutting diagram.