The Melting Tip That Ensures A Silky Smooth Chocolate Eclair Glaze

If you're a home baker who has successfully conquered cupcakes, cookies, and brownies, perhaps you're ready to try a slightly more complicated recipe. Chocolate eclairs are a great way to dip your toes into the art of French pastries. Made with a pâte à choux dough, then filled with pastry cream and topped with a chocolate glaze, making chocolate eclairs can be a great way to spend an afternoon. If you've never made them before, there are a few major tips you should follow to ensure that they'll be a hit, one of which involves chopping your chocolate into small pieces before melting it so that it's extra silky and smooth.

When your eclairs and pastry cream are all ready to go, the last step to making eclairs is preparing the chocolate to pour over top to make that classic, sweet shell. In our mini chocolate eclairs recipe, we recommend melting small chunks of dark chocolate instead of a full bar. The next time you make eclairs, be sure to slice your chocolate into even small, evenly sized pieces, so that when you create the chocolate mixture, the heavy whipping cream melts everything smoothly. Plus, the smaller the chunks are, the quicker your chocolate will melt. If your chocolate chunks are too big, it will be hard to get a nice, glossy texture and, in turn, the dipped coating on your eclairs won't look as smooth or professional.

Melting chocolate for the eclair glaze is probably the easiest part of the eclair-making process, so long as you make it easy for yourself and chop your chocolate strategically. Before you get to that final step, however, it's important that you follow the recipe instructions to a T — and that includes properly utilizing pastry bags for piping the pâte à choux dough. Our chocolate eclair recipe is made simple with a piping bag, and recipe developer Eric Ngo has a variety of tips if you've never used a piping bag before.

Beyond forming the pâte à choux properly, another common pitfall in eclair-making is a cracked surface. This can happen when the oven's temperature is too high, as the inside of the eclair expands faster than the outside, causing it to basically burst at its seams and create a not-so-pretty shape. To fix this issue, make sure that you check your oven's temperature before baking. If this issue only happens on a few of your eclairs, use sugar to figure out where your oven's hot and cold spots are so that you can prevent future baking mishaps. Overall, if you're patient and are unafraid of making mistakes, you'll be on your way to making bakery-style chocolate eclairs at home in no time.