MADE: New Year's Eve Gougères (Pictures Coming Soon)

Sometimes, you decide to go to Times Square for New Years Eve. Sometimes, your friends tell you that you’re crazy, and bribe you away from such wild ideas with promises of dinner parties and copious alcohol.

For BlissandTell, the joyous 2011-2012 crossover was one of those times.

The resulting party was all that was promised: delicious food, hilarity with friends, and freely flowing libations. While nothing can top the power of pure, unadulterated FRIENDSHIP, I’d have to say that the highlights of this dinner party, culinary-wise, were the puffs of cheesy dough that have been popping up all over my internet life lately, yelling “BAKE ME. BAAAAAKE MEEEEE”: gougères.

Usually, I’m not so good at poufy pastry-type adventures; I simply don’t have the patience required for things like “setting” or “rising.” I tend to regard instructions like “refrigerate, covered, for one hour” as guidelines rather than rules, and while some recipes can withstand such cavalier treatment unscathed, puffy French pastries are not generally among them.

For me, that’s what’s great about gougères. They have all of my favorite parts of cooking—beer, cheese, stirring, just a little bit of alchemy—and none of those frustrating “patience” parts. Plus, they’re wacky good; at our party, we consumed all of them pretty quickly, and could easily have eaten a second batch. I’m officially stamping this recipe “Will Be Making Again Soon.”

Gougères

Makes about 2 dozen

Ingredients

8 tbsp butter

1/3 cup milk

2/3 cup beer (or water, if you’re SUPERLAME not into beer)

1 tsp salt

Scant 1 cup flour

4 large eggs, room temperature

1 ½ cup delicious cheese, shredded (I used sharp white cheddar this time around, but cheese experimentation is always encouraged here at BlissandTell)

2 tsp spices (I used a blend of black pepper and ground fennel, with a dash of chili powder and a dash of paprika)

Cooking Instructinos

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. In a medium saucepan, melt butter over medium high heat. Add beer, milk, and salt and bring just to a boil, then reduce the heat to about medium/medium-low. Add the flour and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon. Keep stirring for a minute or two, then remove from heat and stir some more.

Let the mixture cool slightly (over the course of five minutes or so away from heat, with your stirring to help it cool evenly) so that the eggs don’t cook themselves when you add them. Add eggs, one at a time, stirring thoroughly after each addition until batter is fluffy and thoroughly combined.

In a small bowl, mix together the shredded cheese and the spices. Fold about a cup of the cheese-spices mixture into the dough until just combined. Then, immediately drop by heaping tablespoonfuls onto a baking sheet, leaving at least 1 ½ inches between each dough dollop. Sprinkle the remainder of the spiced cheese over the tops of the gougères -to-be.

Bake for five minutes at 425, then turn down the oven heat to 350 and bake for another 20 minutes or so, until the gougères are a lovely golden hue.

Then—DEVOUR your way into a new year.

Happy 2012 from BlissandTell!