For the final white and blue dessert on my tea tower, I had to do a French pastry. It was between macaron or pate choux, and I opted for the pate choux, strictly because they were easier to present in an afternoon tea tower. I love making pate choux. It is the dough used to make eclairs and cream puffs, and in this case, we are making cream puffs topped with craquelin, which is a thin, sugary cookie that encases the light, airy dough and gives it a crunchy exterior. The choux itself is quite a finnicky dough to make. You have to first cook flour with boiling water and melted butter into a dough, then add eggs into that. Then that mixture is piped, then baked, which causes them to puff up into this super light and crispy dough. If you are including craquelin, you would add it on right after piping your choux, and bake the two together. Choux dough does take a bit of time to bake, since you need to properly dry out the insides of it, and adding the craquelin extends that baking time too, since now you are accounting for two different doughs here. For me, a choux bun finished with that craquelin is that little technical French pastry meets professional touch that it needs to set your choux dough apart from a home baker’s cream puff. Mostly because getting a choux with craquelin on topped properly baked is challenging, and also because the final appearance of a craquelin-laced choux is gorgeous and usually an almost perfect half sphere of baked dough.

I filled my choux buns with a coconut cream, and a passionfruit curd. I wanted to go with tropical and sort of oceanic flavors, since I wanted to highlight that aspect of the color blue, being the sea itself! Passionfruit is one of those ingredients that pairs really nicely with sugar and butter, since it is so naturally tart and tangy, while the coconut adds a pleasant, neutral background flavor to work off of. I made a whipped cream with coconut milk, heavy cream, and a little gelatin just to set it properly, and that was stuffed into the puffs along with the passionfruit curd, and the puffs were topped with more of that cream, and dusted with some blue spirulina powder, for a pleasant blue finish. That guarantees that if your blue craquelin dough gets a little too off-colored from the bake in the oven, that the blue spirulina dust on top will completely mask that issue. It’s a nice insurance policy, if you will. These puffs are really light and airy, and the coconut and passionfruit combination help to make them a small, but memorable bite in this blue and white dessert tower!

Makes 8 choux buns:
For the craquelin:
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tbsp granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp blue spirulina

In a bowl, mix together all of the ingredients to form a dough. Refrigerate the dough for 10 minutes, before rolling it out in an even layer that is about 1/8-inch thick. Cut out 1.5-inch rounds of the dough, re-rolling as necessary, until you get enough for 8 disks. Refrigerate these until time to use.

For the choux:
2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tbsp water
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 egg

In a pot, bring butter and water to a boil. Add in the flour first, stirring until that it combined and forms a thick, dough ball. Allow the dough to cool before adding in your egg. Transfer to a piping bag with a round tip, and pipe out 8 1-inch balls of the dough onto a lined sheet tray, spacing them out to at least 2 inches apart. Place the refrigerated dough disks on top of each puff. Bake at 375 degrees F for 12 minutes, then at 325 degrees F for another 12 minutes. Allow the choux to cool in the oven, turned off, for another 5 minutes prior to removing, just so that they don’t deflate.

For the coconut cream:
1/4 cup coconut milk
2 tbsp granulated sugar
1 tsp gelatin powder + 1 tbsp cold water
a pinch of salt
1/2 cup heavy cream

In a pot, reduce the coconut milk, sugar, gelatin, and salt by about half on medium heat. Allow the coconut milk to cool down before whipping it with the cream to stiff peaks. Transfer to a piping bag with a star tip.

For the passionfruit curd:
2oz passionfruit puree
1 tsp gelatin powder + 1 tbsp cold water
1 tbsp cornstarch
a pinch of salt
1 tsp granulated sugar
1 tbsp unsalted butter

Whisk everything in a pot over medium-high heat until the puree begins to thicken and cling to the sides of your whisk. Pass it through a sieve to remove any lumps and transfer to a piping bag with a small round tip.

For garnish:
Blue spirulina powder

Start by poking holes into the bottoms of each puff. Pipe in the curd first, then some of the coconut cream. Pipe more cream on top, and dust the tops with blue spirulina to finish.