This little rosebud has been hanging out at our house this week.

She’s a peach.

A sweetie pie.

A sugar drop.

Even though she’s a piece of cake (excuse me, but the sweetness analogy aboundeth—I can not help myself) to take care of, I’m frazzled.

It’s my kids, see. They have some serious Baby Love Issues.

It’s like this: they all want to hold her, touch her, stick their fingers in her mouth, give her a bottle, put her down for nap, play peek-a-boo, change her diaper, carry her, sing to her, play the piano for her, push her in the stroller, make her laugh, make her stop crying, take her jacket off, put her shoes on, shake rattles in her face, wipe her drool… and so on.

I’m about ready to go out of my mind. Yesterday I squawked at Nickel who was leaving me and the baby no personal space whatsoever, “Will you get back! Just move AWAY.”

He threw his head back (he was smack-dab up against me so in order to see my face he had to tilt his face to the sky) and wailed, “I can’t stand of the baby!”

“What can’t you stand of the baby?” I inquired.

“‘Cause it’s here and it’s so neat!”

That’s pretty much how all the kids feel about Miss Rosy Cheeks, Honey Pie, Sugar Cakes, Hunk O’ Love. (And that goes for me, too. I’m smitten.)

When she went down for a nap today, the kids sagged. They asked when she’d wake up. They waited. They puttered. My oldest son begged to be allowed to just go in and look at her, take a picture of her, do something. I said no, and gave them an early lunch to help ease the monotony. Still, they hovered.

“That’s it!” I shouted in a stage-hiss. “This is not helpful. You guys are all old enough to help with a baby, but I am not going to sit around to help you be helpful. If I need to watch you then I’m going to give you jobs so I can at least watch you doing something helpful. Got it?“

They kind of got it, but not really. The baseboards got dusted, courtesy of a certain little boy who would not leave the room, and I did some threatening and wild gesticulating, but I am typing this so something is working.

Oops. I wrote that too soon.

Suddenly all four kids are milling about, poking Little Miss Buttercup and offering her kisses and toys, the poor dear. Better run…

Signed,
Sugar Drop’s Secret Service Agent

This same time, years previous: grape kuchen and coconut brownies

Because she left me such a fetching comment a couple weeks back. It went like this:

Sorry this is off-topic, but do you take requests?

I needed to bake cream puffs this evening (yes, needed!), so of course I clicked to your recipe list, searching for cream puffs, or profiteroles, or even eclairs. Nothing!

My desperation told me I’ve become addicted to your obsessive recipe-perfecting process. It felt really, really wrong to pull an anonymous, un-vetted recipe from cooks.com, and I was intimidated by the Bavarian cream recipes, so I finally just cooked up some vanilla custard and stuffed the cream puffs with that and some raspberry jam. They were fine, but…

All that to say, if your hens are laying gangbusters like mine now that spring is here, you could do a whole lot worse than to use some of those eggs up on cream puffs.

And then you could share your secrets…

Well. How could I ignore such a desperate and sweet plea?

Actually, I thought I could ignore it just fine. I wasn’t all that interested in cream puffs at present. I had made them before—years before—and they were good, but cream puffs just weren’t the type of thing I crave that often, if ever.

But still. Her little request wriggled its way into the corners of my conscious, staked out a territory, and then proceeded to create all sorts of mayhem. It yodeled. It danced the two-step. It did somersaults and jumping jacks. And then it started scootching its tent closer and closer till it was occupying prime mental real estate and all I could think of were those dang cream puffs.

And then, just like Kirsten predicted (am I that easy to read?), I zeroed in on the ornery little buggers and got all sorts of obsessive. I researched the internet. I separated eggs. I baked. I tasted. I researched cookbooks. I took notes. I separated more eggs. I did more baking. Until now, finally, after three rounds of puff baking and four pastry creams, I have a cream puff recipe I’m happy with.

I sure hope it makes Kirsten happy, too.

The puff recipe is simple to make and a blast to bake.

Puff pastry is just a super-thick roux (butter, milk, water, and flour) that gets cooked over the stove and then, off heat, gets a bunch of eggs beaten into it.

Sit by your oven door while they bake for some real live entertainment: the little yellow blobs of dough bake up into the most ethereal clouds—it’s a hoot!

The pastry cream was a little trickier. Pastry cream is just like a custard, except that it’s thicker (so you can cut it with a knife when it’s in a pie), has been stabilized with either cornstarch or flour, and is cooked on the stove top. It’s simple enough to make—the hard part was finding a recipe I liked.

The first pastry cream (crème pâtissière) I made came from Smitten Kitchen. Deb’s recipe used cornstarch as the thickener which gave, in my lowly opinion, too much of a starchy taste.

The next recipe came from a 1998 Bon Appetit recipe that I found on epicurious. It used half and half, less eggs, and just flour, and ended up being my favorite.

Nigella Lawson’s recipe, the third, curdled.

For my fourth and last spin with pastry cream, I turned to Julia Child. Her recipe was good, but a tad bit too starchy (it used a whole half cup of flour). Plus, the recipe was fussy.

Needless to say, we’ve been subsisting on cream puffs. The kids adore them and pop them into their mouths as fast as I can fill them (the puffs, not their mouths).

As for me, I’m a goner.

Last night found me sitting on the sofa, whimpering to my (very unsympathetic) husband that all I wanted at that very moment was a cream puff. I needed a cream puff. (I get you now, Kirsten.) Cream puffs complete me.

He said something kind and supportive, like, “Quit your whining, you big baby.”

Cream Puffs

The Puff Part
(recipe adapted from Dorie Greenspan)

½ cup milk
½ cup water
1 stick butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
5 eggs

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, heat the water, milk, butter, and salt. When the butter has melted and the mixture is bubbling, dump in the flour, turn the heat to medium-high and commence to beat the mixture with a wooden spoon. Do this for 2 to 3 minutes—you are cooking the flour. Your arm will feel like it will fall off. (It won’t, don’t worry.) Dump the mixture into the bowl of your kitchen aid, or another mixing bowl, and allow it to cool for a few minutes. Then beat in the eggs, one by one. Make sure each egg is fully incorporated (and then some) before adding the next.

Using a spoon, drop the dough onto a parchment-lined (or greased and floured) baking sheet. You can make the puffs any size you choose—I like mine on the small side. Bake the puffs at 375 degrees for 15 minutes (don’t open the oven during that time), and then rotate the tray and bake for another 10 minutes, for a total baking time of 25-30 minutes.

Transfer the puffs to a baking rack to cool. Julia says it’s imperative that you poke a little hole in the puffs so that the steam can escape—this prevents the puffs from getting soggy—but I didn’t always do that and couldn’t detect any difference.

Using a sharp knife, cut the top off the puff. Fill the puff with pastry cream, place the cap back on top, and dust the puff with powdered sugar or chocolate ganache (a couple tablespoons of hot cream with a half cup of finely chopped chocolate stirred in).

Notes:
*to make éclairs, put the dough into a pastry bag (or a plastic bag with the corner cut off) and pipe the dough onto the lined baking sheet. My pastry bag hole wasn’t bit enough, so I ended up piping three strips to make one éclair. This didn’t work so hotsy-totsy, as the strips tended to peel off of each other. Moral of the story: pipe one really thick strip of dough when making éclairs.
*profiteroles are just room temperature puffs filled with ice cream and topped with hot chocolate (or caramel, butterscotch, etc.) sauce.
*puffs can be filled with all sorts of things, savory as well as sweet. Good savory ideas are chicken, tuna, or salmon salad. Sweet ideas (ha!) can be anything from plain whipped cream to chocolate pudding to fresh berries to jam and cream to the classic pastry cream (recipe follows).
*one of the best things about these puffs is that you can drop them onto a wax paper covered sheet, flash freeze them, and then peel them off the paper and pop them into a bag and back in to the freezer where they’ll keep for several weeks/months. To bake, stick the frozen blobs of dough straight into the hot oven (on the prepared baking sheets, of course) and proceed as normal—just add a few minutes to the baking time.
*baked, unfilled, cooled puffs can be frozen. To serve, thaw and then put them in a hot oven for a couple minutes to crisp them up.

The Cream Part: Vanilla Pastry Cream
Adapted from Epicurious

1 ½ cups half-and-half
½ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons flour
2 teaspoons vanilla

Heat the half-and-half in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. While the half-and-half is heating, whisk the sugar, eggs and egg yolk, and flour in a small bowl. Once the half-and-half is hot, temper the egg mixture with it. Pour the tempered eggs back into the saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil one minutes, still stirring vigorously. Pour the pastry cream into a clean bowl and whisk in the vanilla. Cover it with a piece of wax paper (to prevent a skin from forming) and place in the refrigerator to chill completely.

Notes (or, ideas and pointers gleaned from my obsessive reading):
*European pastry creams tend to be eggier, thicker, and less sweet while North American pastry creams tend to be lighter, whiter, sweeter, and more custardy. The above pastry cream is more European. It got quite yellow, thanks to our gangbuster eggs.
*If you want a lighter pastry cream, you can fold some beaten and sweetened egg whites into the chilled pastry cream, or perhaps some whipped cream or sour cream. Or so I’ve read.
*For chocolate pastry cream, add a few ounces of chopped chocolate to the finished, but still hot, pastry cream. Keep in mind that the chocolate, once chilled, will make the cream set up harder, so if you’ll be adding much chocolate you may want to cut back on some of the flour.
*For a butterscotchy pastry cream, use brown sugar instead of white.
*Add citrus zests—lemon, lime, or orange.
*Liquors can give yummy flavor, too.
*Once chilled, pastry cream can get a little gloppy. Whisk well before using.
*To fill éclairs, you’ll need to pipe in the cream with a pastry bag.

If this post didn’t provide enough cream puff information to suit you, here are a couple more links: chowhound and wikipedia.

This same time, years previous: oatmeal crackers

Ever since she was a babe, our second daughter has been a thumb thucker.

But not just any thumb, mind. It had to be her left thumb—the right one didn’t taste right (or something).

And she couldn’t just pop her thumb in her mouth and suck away, oh no. She had to hold a corner of her spit rag (so named because she was a huge spitter-upper—the rags were always on hand when she was little, and then when she got bigger she refused to relinquish them) in order to suck her thumb.

If she couldn’t find the allocated spit rag, she’d make do with a corner of the diaper she was currently wearing.

Seeing as this particular child is rather high-strung, the fact that she could self sooth was a huge gift. She’d be walloping about in her carseat, screaming about Something Or Other, and all I’d have to do was chuck her spit rag at her and bark SUCK YOUR THUMB and she’d shut right up. Or if she already had her spit rag, then simply threatening to take it from her was enough to make her snap out of it (sometimes). The value of an old diaper must never be underestimated.

The saving grace of this whole thumb-sucking addiction was that she couldn’t suck her thumb without her rag. Take away the rag (which she called her Spic Rag—we hoped no one would overhear her and think we were racist) and the thumb stayed out of the mouth. This made for easy public thumb-sucking weaning. For a year or two now the rag has been stored on the shelf, getting pulled into service only during rest times, nighttimes, and bad days (and anytime she can sneak it without me knowing).

But now that she’s seven and her first baby tooth is on its wobbly way out, John and I have decided it’s time to break the thumb-sucking habit once and for all. This means we had to get her to give up her precious spit rag.

So we had a burning ceremony. We doused the stinky thing with gasoline and torched it while sitting around the fire pit and singing Rock-a-bye Baby and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Just kidding. (Please tell me you didn’t fall for that?)

What we did do was, over the course of several weeks, talk to her about why we wanted her to give up the thumb. We explained. We reasoned. We stayed slightly removed, informative, matter-of-fact. After laying the groundwork, I presented the plan. “Here’s what we’ll do,” I said. “If you go three rest times and three nights without your spit rag, then we’ll take you out for an ice cream cone.” I even made a little chart to illustrate.

At first she was kind of excited. “Can I have two kinds of ice cream?” “Can I go to Mr. J’s Bagels and Dairy Queen and get a toy?”

Then she got slightly anxious.“Can I check off the box before I go to bed?” Can I skip rest time? Because then I won’t miss my spit rag.”

And then she got frantic. “Three nights is too long! You should make it less!”

But we stayed firm.

The first night was the hardest. We could hear her crying quietly, so I went upstairs and climbed into her be-curtained bed (a birthday present from her Papa) and wrapped my arms around her.

“I can’t sleep,” she sobbed. “Can’t we just do rest times and let me have it at night?”

A little piece of my heart chipped off, but I said no.

“You are being incredibly brave,” I gushed. “This is so hard for you, I know. Do you think you could hold one of your dolls instead? Which one is your favorite?”

She rummaged through the menagerie of stuffed and plastic bodies littering her bed and dug out the red sweatshirted brown teddy her sister had given her as a birthday present.

“Aw, isn’t he sweet,” I chirped. “Hug him tight. And look! His feet feel funny. Squeeze them while you go to sleep and think of ice cream cones. Think of all the different flavors. What kind do you think you’ll chose?”

I rubbed her back for a little, and then I went downstairs. We had just a few minutes reprieve before the whimpering started up again—John went upstairs that time. And when she woke up during the night, he was the one to go over and sleep in her bed.

But in the morning there were sleepy proud smiles, hugs and high-fives, and one little box got x-ed off.

Last night John laid beside her till she fell asleep, and when she came downstairs this morning (she was still holding her teddy bear), she announced that the second night was much better.

Thank goodness, because I don’t know how much more heartbreak I can stand.

This same time, years previous: smoky fried chickpeas, brandied-bacony roast chicken