Pate a choux: the unhealthier cabbage!

This week was a lot about Pate a Choux, the basic dough for pastries like eclairs, cream puffs, profiteroles, and a french cake you may be familar with which is basically lots of profiteroles stacked like a christmas tree with spun sugar around it. In french it means "head of cabbage" because it does kinda resemble it once its baked. Anyhow, we only had to make cream puffs, eclairs, and "swans" which were literally this pastry dough filled with chocolate, whipped cream, strawberries, and little heads and wings! they were percious. Again, i apologize for forgetting to bring my camera, its just that its VERY easy to get it damaged (a lot of flour and sugar flying around in the kitchen) in the baking labs. Anyhow the Pate a choux consits of lots of butter and eggs. Although you might think its super rich, its actually quite airy, hence its popular to fill it. We made a plethora of pastry creams as well this week. We made a great one for out napolians on monday which consisted of milk, eggs, gelatin, cornstarch, and the best part, pure vanilla beans. I dont get to use fresh vanilla beans very often (they are super pricy, often sold like safron with only one or two pods). There was a a case chock-full of these dried vanilla beans and I was so tempted to steal some! but i am not that kelpto, so i restrained myself. I think the chef is good, like i said, a hard ass miltary drill sergeant type but he teaches effectivly. plus, i think he noticed my extra efforts because he told me he appriecated me cleaning his demo-table every night (i do this because no one else does and the sooner we clean up, the sooner we get to go home!) and said he added extra points to my grade. Speaking of grades, its midterm now, so we got our midterm grades. I have an "A" although i admit, i am not that proud of it. I do well on quizes and homework, but to be honest, i think the products i make aren't great. I dont have a passion for baking, and i a think my mediocre results in my products show it. but its very hard for most of the class actually to get things to turn out perfect. But i am a perfectionist, so naturally this irritates me. The cool thing is that I've been making all these pastries that frankly, i dont eat very much of (i DO taste everything, but I have theory that i dont have rich desserets unless i am absolutly craving it) and neither do the people living with me, so i've been giving them to people i buy from as i mentioned in my last post. Its cool, i scored free sushi last week! I really hope to be able to make desserts using less sugar and saturated fat by the end of this course. Infact, i have a little idea: please send in a "sinful" dessert that you'd like to get "lightend" up. I'll try a bunch of different substitutions i think will work and hopefully will come up with something nice. I'll post it here with pictures too. Lets send some desserts to rehab!