Another day of Patisserie, and we were looking at choux pastry, flan pastry & Viennese dough =)

I've never made choux pastry before, so I was quite keen to have a go, & actually it's quite easy.   The pastry, once made, has a lovely sheen to it, & is quite tasty!  Then, it was simply a case of piping it out to the desired shape.

We made petite eclairs, & enormous choux buns!  Honestly, I was expecting buns the size of your standard profiteroles; instead, we had these!

We allowed the choux pastries to cool, while we made up the creme patissiere & our flan pastry.  The creme pat wasn't too tricky to make up, especially as we used proper flour, rather then the gluten free stuff we mistakenly used last week!

The flan pastry was extremely short, & very tricky to roll out, but eventually we managed it.  We were making fruit flans, so once the pastry cases had cooled, we filled them with the creme pat, & topped them with lovely fresh fruits =)

There was no set design here, we were given free reign to decorate however we saw fit, with whatever fruits we liked.  I used sliced peach, strawberries, blueberries, & a solitary blackberry =)

We then whipped up some cream & filled the choux pastry, then topped them with fondant icing; we had a choice of coffee or chocolate.  As I'm not a fan of coffee flavoured things, I went for chocolate =D

We also tackled Viennese pastry, which was so tough to pipe out!  I'm think it may have needed to be a little softer really; either that or I just don;t have the strength in my hands to do it!  But eventually we did have a reasonable selection of shapes & sizes!  (I didn't manage to get a picture of those I'm afraid, I got distracted!)

But, I did get a picture of our display tray, showcasing the results of a days labour =)

You can just about see the finished Viennese biscuits on the tray, they looked quite good once they'd been dipped in chocolate & sandwiched with whipped cream =D

Sadly, whilst the fruit flan did make it home in one piece, I had a slight disaster when trying to get it into a container to keep in the fridge!  So now I have a slightly messy, but still tasty, fruit flan! =D