Chocolate Eclairs and Mad Hungry

All the ingredients laid out.  This recipe was perfect because it used
14 eggs!  Our hens have gone into laying overdrive.

Today I have a cookbook recommendation and some food pictures for you.

Just a bit of the mess that ensued.

Our church was having a bake sale.  I volunteered to make chocolate eclairs and, boy, were they tedious to make...I mean, good.  First, you make a cream puff dough, made of melted butter, water, flour, and salt.  Then you squeeze the dough through a pastry bag and end up covering every surface and large sections of your hair in dough.  Then you pause, disgusted, and start just spooning the dough onto the cookie sheets.  After the puffs are baked, they are sliced and left to cool while you go make a custard that for some aggravating reason gets filled with little cooked egg lumps.  After straining the custard, you cool it for an hour, while you pull out your double boiler and cook a chocolate ganache.  After the chocolate ganache comes within seconds of burning and sticking because you are too busy reading a hilarious autobiography, you take that off and let it cool.  Now it's time to fill those eclairs.  First you fill one half heaping full with that lovely custard that turned out gorgeously, then put the top cap on and drizzle chocolate ganache over all.

The gorgeous eclairs...all 22 of them.

After I took a bite of that perfectly airy, elegant eclair, it was all worth it and I found myself forgetting all the work and the fact that every single dish in the kitchen was dirty as I smiled and licked my fingers.

Yes, the subtitle is Feeding Men and Boys.
I have no idea why.  However, the recipes are for anybody.

These delicious eclairs came from the fabulous book Mad Hungry.  It's written by Lucinda Scala Quinn and it's a book on cooking hearty family food instead of eating out, but really anybody.  Her recipes are well-written, look delicious, and taste delicious (at least the ones I've had).  The photographs are pretty and aid in making me even hungrier for the delicious recipes.  If you're a voracious cookbook reader, you most definitely need to buy this book.  If you're not, then please just go to the library and check the book out.  You might surprise yourself and end up purchasing a copy...

Yum.

And every. single. chocolate. eclair. sold.  I'm actually a little sad about that.  I was hoping for a little treat this afternoon...