Sometimes a Bad Notion

My my my. How long have I been cooking and baking?
Not long enough to learn anything, I find.

When I posted about baking cream puffs in maple syrup, I hadn't tried them yet.
Cream puffs, of course, should be dry and crisp on the outside, hollowed out on the inside with still some eggy string-like filling that should be scooped out before they are filled with a sweet or savory substance.

So I performed the experiment. They came out of the oven tiny, not puffed, and eggy, while the maple syrup had cooked down into partly burned and partly hard candy. These weren't bad tasting, just not cream puffs, and really unwieldy to be scraped from the pan.

Why did this happen? Well, cream puffs, we will remember, need a hot, steady, dry heat to bake properly, and baking them in a liquid provided diametrically opposite conditions. And baking biscuits in maple syrup for 12 minutes provides just enough time for the syrup to thicken a bit and perhaps turn custardy. However, the cream puffs bake for 4o to 50 minutes, evaporating the syrup into candy.


Big waste of maple syrup!