Summer Teen Fun 'Cream Puffs' (with BFF)

Cream puff Making is super fun for teens, grand-teens, tweens, or even girls just 8 yrs and up will love making this recipe! This recipe is not hard at all and its no different from making a craft with a bunch of girls and having to buy a bunch of craft supplies. For this recipe you need very few ingredients, and you probably have all the ingredients on hand! It can be a great FUN summer vacation thing for girls to make together as my daughter and her friend did. So if your looking for a great summer vacation idea for girls here’s a great one.

When my youngest daughter was perfecting her cream puff making skills…

……she had a friend over and they had a lot of fun in the kitchen, one summer afternoon! School was out and they were bored, and what better to do then make homemade cream puffs together.

Her friend had never made them before, although my youngest daughter had, this was a great reason to perfect her skills and was something super fun to do with her sweet friend one afternoon.

So YEP those are dishes in background…..piled high, that’s what happens when ya have too much fun, and cupboard doors get left open and well that’s a sure sign their having fun. So just go with it mamma, and don’t fuss over those dishes but instead get your camera and use your time capturing this memory…..you’ll be glad you did….just as I am. (those dishes are worth their smilin’ faces)

“Perfectin my baking with a good friend in the kitchen on a summer day, when there wasn’t much else to do, but make plates and plates of cream puffs for each of our families to enjoy after dinner!”

Cream Puffs

Cream puffs are so easy to make. Don’t shoot for perfect and they’ll turn out great every time!

Ingredients

The Puff

½ cup butter (not margarine!)
1 cup water
1 cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
4 eggs

Custard Filling

¾ cup instant vanilla pudding mix (I buy it in bulk, but it’s equivalent to 1 large box of pudding.) I have this filling more times than I can count and its a no fail recipe and always yummy.
2 cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup whipped cream – heavy cream you have whipped with ¼ C powdered sugar added to it. (I don’t use cool whip, but you could try it)

Chocolate Icing

1 ½ cup milk chocolate chips
2 tablespoons palm shortening or coconut oil (I don’t use vegetable shortening, but I’m sure anything would work here)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 450

In a saucepan, bring butter and water to a rapid boil, stirring til butter melts. Reduce heat to low and add flour & salt. Stir vigorously until mixture leaves the side of pan and forms a stiff ball (resembling playdough is what I always say to my girls).

Remove from heat and now add eggs one at a time, beating well (with a spoon) after each addition (do not use beaters!). Now plop large spoons of dough onto a cookie sheet (recipe makes about 7-9 puffs). Bake at 450 for 15 min and then reduce the temperature to about 325 for another 15-20 min more. They should be golden brown. Try not to open the oven door, only check them by looking through the oven window. Remove from pan and cool on rack immediately. Let them cool for several hours before filling them yummy custard recipe below.

Now you can pipe them nice and neat and make long johns if ya want , yep weve done them that way too, but my favorite is to plop them on a sheet and let them have natural real cream puff look about them. How ever you make them, your gonna love the tender pastry filled to brim with creamy custard center and drizzled with chocolate on top. Trust me!

Ok now for the easy creamy custard filling. Beat the mix, milk and vanilla on LOW with beaters until thickened. Set aside.

Now stir your pudding and your sweetened whipped cream together gently to fold and mix nicely.

Now using a very large tip, fill an icing bag with some of the custard filling and poke into the top of your cream puff. Gently squeeze some in and you’ll kinda see and feel your puff expand (you can cut a small slit in the top of the puffs with a knife to make it easier to insert tip into). You’ll see that this is the learning part! Sometimes a lil starts to squish out a weak spot or hole on the side of the puffs. It’s okay. We want our girls to learn the art of gently filling things; let them figure it out and they’ll get it right. The goal is to have fun on the journey:) Just Fill each puff...... sometimes we have a lil filling left over -- no one seems to mind eating a spoon or two that’s left!

Ok once they are all filled then we drizzle them with chocolate and cover up the hole where we filled them.

Melt together chocolate chips and shortening or oil on very very low heat or double boiler style. Stir well. Let cool completely! (or make this before the filling and let set aside to cool)

Now using a spoon, just drizzle the chocolate all over the filled puffs, covering up the hole or slit where you filled them and they are Done that easy.

If not serving them right away, they need to be refrigerated. Enjoy!

And that’s not all they did….. ????….. While cream puffs cooled and awaited to be filled, they took a break and painted their nails for the 4^th of July ????

Summer Teen Fun ‘Cream Puffs’ (with BFF)