Mom's canapés and cream puffs

There's no photo because we ate them. The blue cheese cream puffs, not the photos.

I made them for friends who stopped by yesterday. As we cleaned up afterward,  C and I finished the last two -- and then I remembered I'd meant to take a picture. Oh, well. You can imagine how they look: lopsided airy buttons oozing cheese. Everybody loved how they taste.

A long time ago Mom made cream puffs with this recipe. She'd fill them with homemade vanilla pudding and top them with chocolate glaze. It is amazing to me that we considered this an ordinary dessert.

Sometimes for a cocktail party she'd make the dough into tiny puffs, filled with a mixture of cream cheese, blue cheese, a little grated onion, and some half and half.

As we were planning our New Year party this year (last year??),  I saw the documentar,  Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is a celebration of doing one thing right. It made me want to go back to old recipes like Mom's cream puffs.

Mom's Cream Puffs

In a saucepan, heat to boiling:
1 C. water
1/2 C. butter
Stir in:
1 C. flour.
Stir constantly over medium heat until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan and forms a ball. This doesn't take very long, about a minute.

Put dough into bowl of your mixer and let it cool a little bit. You are going to add eggs, and you don't want them to start cooking when they hit the hot dough.

Mix in four eggs one at a time. Beat until smooth.

Drop the dough onto parchment paper-lined cookie sheet, leaving at least an inch between them. For the canapés, I used a 1 T.  cookie scoop. If you're making dessert puffs, you can make them bigger. Mom made hers kind of roundish; you can also make them into long finger shapes. I filled two cookie sheets.

Bake at 425° for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 375° for 10 more minutes. I actually forgot them and added a few more minutes, with no bad results.

Right away slit the puffs and put them back into the oven, which has been turned off. Prop open the oven door and leave them there for about 45 minutes so they dry out. My new Baking Illustrated, by the editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine, says that at this point you can keep them at room temperature for a day or freeze them for a month. I stored them in a cookie jar overnight. In the morning I warmed up the oven to 375° again and warmed them for about 5 minutes. This kind of revived them. When cool, I filled each one a spoonful of this mixture:

16 ounces cream cheese, beaten with good blue cheese to taste (quite a bit)

As I said, Mom used to add a whiff of onion juice and some cream. I skipped the onion because not everyone likes the taste, and I forgot about the cream. But next time I'm adding it. This made just enough to fill all the puffs generously. I forgot to count them.

Another time I'm going to make tiny puffs filled with pudding and frosted with chocolate. Really, this is not too much trouble if you make the puffs the night before.