Chouquettes are fast and easy to make, and addictively delicious! Let’s start with the important question.
What are chouquettes?
These are little choux pastry puffs that are baked with Swedish pearl sugar on top. The pearl sugar is generously sprinkled on top before the pastry is baked. The result is a puffy, light choux pastry, with an addictively crunchy sweetness on the outside. Fair warning though, it is SO easy to gobble these babies up one after another. You’ll need a heavy dose of self-restraint to stop from turning into a chouquette yourself.
How to make chouquettes
There are only two components to this sweet, simple snack.
Choux pastry
I adore making choux pastry! I could make it with my eyes closed. OK, maybe not quite, but I’ve made it hundreds upon hundreds of times over many years, it’s pretty much muscle memory for me by now.
Choux pastry is a very simple dough, and the fact that these chouquettes don’t even need a filling means that these babies can enter my gullet after being baked that much sooner.
I have a separate post on all the basics of choux pastry, with plenty of troubleshooting tips. You can use that recipe and guide to get perfect results for your choux pastry too.
Melt the butter and milk in a saucepan, along with a pinch of salt and sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil.
Add the flour (off heat), and stir to form a dough. You will need to cook it for a few minutes to get the right consistency.
Let it cool and then add the eggs (a little, or one egg at a time), just until you get the correct, pipeable consistency.
Store any unused pastry dough in a piping bag, or ziploc bag to prevent the dough from being exposed to air and forming a skin. You can also store the dough in an air-tight container, as long as you place a plastic wrap over it, touching the surface.
It’s very easy to make choux pastry, if you know what to look for at each step. If you’re new to making choux, I highly recommend reading my in-depth post on how to make choux pastry.
Make sure to line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat. The sugar pearls that are on the tray will melt and caramelize, so a lined pan is easier to clean.
Swedish pearl sugar
Pearl sugar is compressed sugar crystals, formed into large pieces. The large, round-ish particles don’t melt inside baked goods, and retain a nice crunch. Pearl sugar usually comes in two sizes.
Swedish pearl sugar – smaller compressed sugar particles. Belgian pearl sugar – larger compressed sugar particles.
For chouquettes, the smaller pearl sugar (Swedish pearl sugar) is used, because the chouquettes are small themselves. You can have more of the smaller pearl sugar covering a surface area (compared to the larger ones), resulting in a more crunchy texture in the final baked product. Belgian pearl sugar is used for Belgian waffles. These larger sugar pearls have a bigger crunch, and hide well in larger “baked” goods; like the thick liege waffle.
Baking chouquettes
If you’ve made profiteroles before, then these will be eeeaaasy.
I prefer to make chouquettes slightly smaller than the profiteroles that I usually make. So that these will be bite-sized desserts that can easily be popped in to your mouth. They will also bake faster.
Once you’ve piped the choux pastry on a tray, keep the remaining choux pastry in the piping bag.
Generously sprinkle the tops of the choux pastry with Swedish sugar pearls. It’s important that they’re sprinkled with pearl sugar densely, because as the pastry bakes and expands, the sugar pearls will spread out as well.
Once the chouquettes are baked, let them cool down to room temperature. And then devour them immediately!
These are perfect just the way they are. Cue the Bruno Mars song…
Tips for perfecting this recipe
Make sure you get the choux pastry dough right. Pipeable but not runny consistency, and glossy. All the tips and secrets for that are in this post on making perfect choux pastry. Get the size of the chouquettes right. Piping them at the appropriate size might take some practice, but it’s easy. You can watch the video here to see how I pipe consistent shapes (I count up to 2 when piping these chouquettes). When piping, keep the tip just below the surface to avoid poop emoji shapes. 🙂 Then flatten the tip with a little water to prevent them form burning. Sprinkle with pearl sugar generously. There will invariably be some extra pearl sugar that end up on the baking sheet instead. Since these are smaller pastries, I prefer to bake them at one specific temperature. So no changing temperatures halfway through the baking process. Allow the pastries to get some color during the baking process. If you take them out while they are only a light golden color, the insides might not have dried enough, and this can lead to collapsed and flat chouquettes. Don’t forget to prick the cases to allow excess air to flow out of the hot pastry puffs. This also prevents the pastries from collapsing or getting soggy. The insides of your chouquettes should be airy, soft, and custard-like, with a crisp shell on the outside. If you find that the insides are raw, then consider these possibilities,
Was the dough pipeable, or was it hard to pipe (too thick)? If so, the pastry wasn’t light enough to expand and the insides remained raw. Did you pipe larger choux patries? If so, you will need to increase the baking time to cook the insides through. Still raw? Maybe your oven runs a little hotter, and you may need to reduce the temperature slightly to get the pastries to bake all the way through.
How to serve chouquettes
They can be served just the way they are. The soft, milky interior, and crisp outer pastry shell are delicious, but the crunchy sugar pearls put these babies over the top! But if you’d really like to, you can fill these with a little whipped cream for an upgraded version of cream puffs (French cream puffs). Just like choux pastry, cream puffs, classic eclairs, profiteroles, choux au craquelin, and even delicious churros, these are also great when served with a thick, luscious mug of French hot chocolate (Parisian hot chocolate)!
How to upgrade this chouquettes recipe
THIS is the fun part! 🙂 You can easily upgrade these chouquettes with some simple changes.
Brown butter chouquettes – replace the butter with browned butter to give these a lovely flavor boost. See my in-depth post on how to make brown butter. Or add some lemon extract to the dough to turn these into lemon chouquettes. Scrape some fresh vanilla (or use good quality vanilla extract) to make these chouquettes very vanilla forward. Sprinkle some sea salt flakes along with the pearl sugar for a sweet and salty treat. Fill the chouquettes with whipped cream for French cream puffs, or you can opt for a pastry cream (vanilla pastry cream or chocolate pastry cream) if you like too.
