I am the Queen of Choux

I promise I'll stop banging on about Portugal soon...

...But not before a little Port Wine.
Now, me and Tom are pretty into our Port, which is one of the reasons we went to Porto in the first place. And we drank cheap port, expensive port and mostly everything in between. The priciest glass we shared would have set us back over £100 to buy the bottle. Extravagent stuff, wine. 

We even splashed out on a vintage port tasting on our last night, where they gave you little chocolate to match to the different ages of port. Dark chocolate for the oldest and most honeyed, milk for the young and fruity ones. 
Oh, since you ask, I can be very boring for a very long time on the subject of port wine. 
 

But no, since you beg so nicely, I'll restrain myself here. 
Suffice to say that tawny port (my own favourite love!) is supposed to pair with chocolate and cream or egg based desserts. You have to love an alcohol that demands to be drank with pudding. And who am I to ignore the demands of such tasty drink?

 Chocolate Eclairs
Adapted from James Martin's "Desserts"

You see, the eclair is the perfect answer to the question- what is both creamy and eggy and chocolatey? The choux pastry is eggy; just underbake it if you don't believe me, you get a rich, eggy Yorkshire Pudding sort of affair. The cream, obviously, provides the creaminess and the topping is bitter dark chocolate, sweetened just enough to take the edge off.
I had a slight crisis of confidence when I realised that there was, per se, no eclair recipe in my James Martin bible of all things sweet. But then my brain woke up a little bit and I used the profiterole recipe, with my own chocolate sauce.

Minor piping imperfections make big knobbly buns. But they taste just as good!

1. Heat 125ml water, 120g butter and 125ml milk in a pan, don't boil it but do ignore it long enough to get 170g flour measured out. Also preheat the oven to 210 degrees C.
2. Take off the heat and  dump all the flour into the bowl at once. Mix like a woman posessed. (or man, I'm all for equal opportunities patisserie)
3. Go do something else for 5 minutes.  
4. When its nice and cool, add an egg and mix until it doesn't look gross anymore. Repeat. Then repeat. Finally, repeat. That's four eggs for the slower amongst us. 
5. Leave it for a sec and quietly congratulate yourself on not scrambling the eggs. 
6. Pipe big sausages onto a baking tray. Use baking paper if you're cool, like me. Use a wet finger to dab the little flicks where you stopped piping. 
Seriously, choux pastry is magic. Wet finger= no sticking. Dry finger= mixture stuck to anything you touch for the next couple of minutes. What is with that shizzle? 
7. Put them in the oven, and chuck a cupful of water on the floor of the oven. 
8. Five minutes later, open the over door up wide to let all that steam out. We don't want no steamy pastries. But seriously, the steam helps the rise, then we want it gone because it makes our choux soggy. 
9. After another 20 minutes or so they should look a nice brown. Or golden, if you'd like to sound nicer. Whack 'em out and snip them open down the middle. Then whack 'em back in the oven to dry the innards. Another 5 mins should do it. 
10. Let cool, whip cream to soft and peaky perfection (I added a little sugar and vanilla) and smother in chocolate sauce. Mine is 100g bitter dark chocolate, 50g caster sugar, 20g butter and about 20ml milk to stop it setting too hard on the eclairs. Obviously melt the chocolate before you do all the mixing.    
The chocolate sauce will look really dodgy when you add the milk at the end. Have faith though, it does come together with mixing. Again, let it cool before you slather it all over, becasuse hot sauce and cold cream makes a runny mess and no one likes unnecessary running. Not even Paula Radcliffe.