I made these chouquettes with a friend of mine, Sylvie, as a thank you for sowing up a couple of holes I had in one of my sleeveless hoodies, and one of my pairs of work pants. Sylvie loves passionfruit, and in exchange for agreeing to sow up my clothes like the talented seamstress that she is, I agreed to bake something passionfruit flavored for her. Luckily, it was passionfruit season and the farmer’s market had plenty of them, so they were an easy find! When it came to what to make, we wanted to do something more portable, since she was heading down to San Diego the following day, and wanted to bring whatever we made down to her nieces and nephews to eat. So that’s when I had the idea to do chouquettes .

Chouquettes are just a fancier way of saying mini cream puffs. Since cream puffs are made with pate choux dough, chouquettes is just referring to a tinier puff of choux. Unlike normal pate choux, these are not filled at all. They are just a small, hollow shell or puff. Usually topped with pearl sugar or a glaze. In this case, I wanted to go with passsionfruit. I found that the shape of chouquettes was a fun little homage to how a passionfruit is essentially a hollow shell filled with pulp and seeds. And the irony of it would be that we’re taking that and glazing the exterior with it. The glaze is a fairly standard doughnut glaze, using the passionfruit instead of water. Since we had leftover passionfruit glaze, Sylvie wanted to make spun sugar(or as she called it, crunchy sugar), so we went ahead and did that with the leftover glaze just to use it all! With these little chouquettes, they are definitely a fun snack to eat(we ended up eating several of them each), and one regular batch makes a whopping 45, so you’ll be sure to having plenty to go around!

Makes 45 mini puffs:
For the chouquettes:
1/2 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon honey
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
a pinch of salt
2 eggs

Bring butter, water, and honey to a simmer in a pot. Once the butter is fully melted, stir into that mixture your flour. Continue stirring on heat until you have a glossy, shiny ball of dough that is not sticking to the sides of your pot. Take off heat and place into a bowl. Allow the dough to cool down before you add in your eggs, one at a time. Pipe the dough on parchment-lined sheet trays, making each puff about 1/4 inch in diameter, and piping them 2 inches apart. Press the tops of the puffs down with wetted fingers so that they are rounded. This is important or else the tips of the puffs will burn! Bake at 400 degrees F for 20 minutes. Allow your puffs to cool before glazing.

For the glaze:
Pulp from 3 passionfruits
a pinch of salt
1/3 cup powdered sugar

Mix together to form your glaze. Dip the puffs into the glaze and allow them to harden on an icing rack. You should have some residual glaze, which will be used in the spun sugar.

For the spun sugar:
reserved passionfruit glaze
Equal parts sugar and water

Place the passion glaze into a pot. Measure out equal parts sugar and water until the total amount of ingredients in the pot equals 8oz. Bring to a boil and allow the water to reduce and the sugar to caramelize. Once the sugar becomes an amber brown color, take off heat and dip the outside of the pot into room temperature water. Using a fork, drizzle the sugar in threads over the glazed puffs.