Peanut Butter Reindeer Choux Pastry

This was a rather last minute thing that I agreed to and I only did because I thought I can squeeze it in half a day to create! My schedule is really full towards end of the year as always. But I am glad that with some jiggling of my schedule, I can be part of Newmoon's Skippy Christmas Campaign!

Presenting my reindeer choux pastries with the reindeer made out of peanut butter diplomat cream! 

The cream is made with Skippy's smooth creamy peanut butter from a very convenient squeeze bottle! 

I was sent other Skippy products like the grape and strawberry swirl spreads as well! 

You may refer to this post for the choux pastry part. I didn't use frozen batter but just piped it fresh. To be honest, I just dug out a few frozen red craquelin dough cutouts I had in my freezer and used it while I was preparing some prebaked choux cases for a class. That's why the reindeer part only took me half a day to make, assemble and take photos. 

What I want to share in this post is the recipe for peanut butter diplomat cream. I added some cocoa powder to give it another dimension of flavour and a deeper brown but you can use less or omit it. I really love how smooth the cream is! Originally I wanted to do a peanut butter mousseline cream but thought that peanut butter is rather rich and heavy so diplomat cream verison would help to balance out the heaviness as it has whipping cream instead of butter added, and it did! My kids love it! Feel free to upsize to 2 or 3 egg yolks worth as I only made a tiny batch enough to fill maybe a dozen small pastries. 

Peanut butter diplomat cream

Ingredients:

1 egg yolk

100g+1tbs milk (omit the extra 1tbs if not using cocoa powder) 

5g cocoa powder (optional) 

10g cornflour 

15g sugar (use more if you prefer sweeter) 

1/4 tsp vanilla

70g Skippy's smooth peanut butter

50g whipping cream (you may use dairy or non-dairy. Be careful not to overwhip if using dairy. Use more if you prefer lighter texture. Add sugar if using dairy. ) 

Steps:

1. Heat 100g milk in small saucepan until steaming hot but not boiling. In the mean time, place peanut butter and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Put egg yolk, cornflour, sugar, cocoa powder and 1tbs of milk and whisk until well combined. 

2. When milk is hot, pour in a thin stream into egg yolk mixture while whisking the egg yolk mix continuously. Pour back into saucepan and continue whisking and cooking until it thickens. Be careful to keep the heat low so you don't get scrambled egg. 

3. Pour custard into peanut butter bowl and mix until smooth. Sieve the custard into the bowl if there are lumps. Press cling wrap onto surface of pastry cream. Refrigerate for at least 1h or overnight. 

4. Whip whipping cream until firm peak or stiff peak. Remove pastry cream from fridge. Briefly whip pastry cream to lighten texture. Fold whipped cream in. Transfer into piping bags to fill pastry cases. 

For the reindeer assembly, I just piped some chocolate antlers onto parchment paper and let it set for a while in the freezer. The eyes are Wilton eye sprinkles and the nose is a jumbo red heart sprinkle cut into circle using fondant cutter because I don't have red mini M&Ms or red round sprinkle on hand. If you don't want to buy the eye sprinkles (which I had on hand), you may pipe the eyes using melted chocolate too. A word of warning on using red sprinkles. Try to put it on soon before serving as it will bleed colour into the cream after a while. M&Ms may be better but will also bleed colour eventually. You can also cut out circles using red sour candy strip which is unlikely to have this issue but the red may not be as intense. 

The filling is delightful for peanut butter lovers! Very strong roasted peanut aroma, a good balance of sweet and savoury, and the cream is light. 

With love, 

Phay Shing