Go to the Recipe: Perfect Éclairs
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Can I ask, why not use plain pastry creme for the filling? Will you not be able to pipe into the prepared shell?
You are welcome to use plain pastry cream for the filling, but it's nontraditional. I'd chalk that primarily up to:
Pastry cream is thicker and "gooier" than crème légère. The eating experience would read a little richer and eggier. Crème légère tends to read lighter, more whipped, less pudding-like, and it won't burst out as quickly as pastry cream when you bite into the éclair.
But to answer your question, yes, you can definitely pipe plain pastry cream into your éclairs, and it should pipe reasonably well. If you wanted a little extra stability/pipe-ability (and a hedge against weeping/syneresis), I would melt a sheet of bloomed gelatin into the pastry cream off heat after cooking, before cooling and whipping.
Hope this helps!
I made this recipe and as you can see from the photos my eclairs, although delicious, were not perfect. I bought a silicone mat with templates without noticing the spacing was not sufficient and I expect that was my main problem. I made pastry cream the day before I made the choux, glaze and finished the creme legere. All the directions were clear and the steps easy. I found the tip of using the knife to cut the choux when forming the eclairs especially helpful. My mat had 18 templates and I had enough choux to make all 18 but next time I'll use every other template to allow for better air flow. The final results were a hit and as you can see I decorated several for the 6 and under crowd who grabbed them out box and ate them before I could get plates. The 3 year old ate hers like an ear of corn from the top and left the bottom crust behind. She had a chocolate covered face for the rest of the afternoon. I kept the shells and components in the refrigerator and the eclairs crisped up perfectly until we finished them. I did have to add a bit of vanilla pudding mix to the legere after the 2nd day as it was collapsing a bit too much to pipe easily. Next time I would probably add some pudding mix to the whipped cream before incorporating it into the pastry creme if I did not expect to finish the eclairs the first day. The glaze was perfect but I ended up with around 360 grams of it left after glazing all 18 eclairs. I will cut the glaze recipe in half next time. This time the extra glaze became truffles. Even with my eclairs not looking perfect everyone really enjoyed these and I will make these often. Thanks Tim, as always, for the great recipe.
Great work as always, Al!
Yes, air flow always helps in this situation, especially if you're baking in a home still oven. Good feedback regarding the légère and glaze yield. Vanilla pudding mix, gelatin-stabilization, or even xanthan gum in the whipped cream will give you a more stable cream, though technically the name changes (Crème diplomat includes gelatin, for instance.)
For the chocolate glaze yield, I found it important to keep the scaling higher for the purposes of temperature stability when glazing. It's really difficult to maintain a specific glazing temperature at a smaller yield, not to mention it becomes physically difficult to dip the eclairs when you're working with that little glaze.
