Kelsey's Cream Puffs

Kelsey made cream puffs today. I have never been a big cream puff fan, but she thinks they're wonderful. She wiggled into my bed after breakfast, saying she wanted to make something yummy. I told her to go ahead. When she said she wanted to make cream puffs, I did an internal eye-roll and then told her to get The Joy of Cooking, that book would have the best recipe. She said she'd already bookmarked it in January. Figures.

She looked through the recipe. The ingredients were simple enough. She declared she was not going to sift the flour because she hates sifting and it never makes any difference. Whatevs, chickie. She also decided to make half a recipe since a full recipe was 24 cream puffs, and, for some wild reason, she thought 24 was too many. Of course, halving the recipe brought questions.

"How am I going to add two to two-and-a-half eggs? I'm just going to use two." Fine.

"How much butter is a sixth of a cup?" I took a break from folding laundry and showed her how to measure it.

Her arm got a bit tired stirring, but she did fine. They puffed up wonderfully, and she was quite pleased with the outcome.

We bought a can of whipped cream (because the cans are fun and "they remind me of spray cheese," she says) and vanilla pudding since she's the only one who actually wanted cream in her cream puffs.

Often I don't care much for that kind of pastry. It's always hard and tasteless or so thin that it falls apart in your hand and tasteless. Yuck.

Kelsey is, naturally, spectacular. And her cream puffs were, naturally, spectacular. They were moist and sweet, delicate without being flimsy, firm without being hard. I actually liked them and could definitely have eaten my share of the 24 had she made the full recipe.

It is her goal to open a bakery when she grows up. She wants to put her art on the walls and have poetry nights. My little bohemian. I think she's well on her way.