Hayley Shucker Recipes

Holy Profiteroles, Batman! Back in May, I made choux pastry for the first time because I wanted to make eclairs for Mother’s Day. I think eclairs look very elegant, which was perfect for a Mother’s Day brunch. I mixed them, pipped them, and baked them only to be disappointed that there was no rise. I mean zero rise at all. I was left with finger-looking, oddly baked pastry; it was chewy and had no flavor. The only saving grace was a raspberry glaze I had made to go on top of them. At that moment, I was so glad that I had decided to make the eclairs a surprise because I didn’t want to show up with those gross looking things and try to pass them off as eclairs. I baked a lemon drizzle cake instead and used the raspberry glaze for the topping and all was well. (However, I still had a fresh batch of raspberry crème pâtissière in the fridge that I had no idea what to do with.) I was pretty convinced choux pastry was out of my reach until now. Since I challenged myself to create fall i...

It’s still a few months away, but Halloween will be here before you know it! In honor of fall and Halloween, there is one thing most people agree on: we need more pumpkin spice in our lives. Companies jump at the opportunity to flavor their products during this time of year, and some of them work really well (others I question). However, I’m a stickler for flavor, and artificial flavors usually don’t do it for me because they either don’t taste like the product or have too much sugar added, which cancels out the naturally beautiful flavor it is trying to replicate. Recently, I was gifted a baking book, and I was overjoyed to find several recipes for different flavors of French macarons. It inspired me to try some of my own flavor combinations, so I've been baking batch after batch and trying loads of new things. I really enjoy macarons, but, when I buy them in stores, I am sometimes disappointed. The meringue can be tricky because it is easily over baked resulting in a hard shell...