First, get all your ingredients ready for the making the profiteroles.
And also the ingredients for the chocolate sauce. Note the 180 grams of butter should be split 100 grams for the choux pastry and 80 grams for the chocolate sauce.
Now sieve the flour, salt and sugar into a bowl, or onto some baking paper ensuring there are no lumps in the flour.
Next, take 250 ml of the water and put into a medium saucepan. Add the 100 grams of butter and melt the butter into the water over a low heat.
As soon as the butter has melted take the pan off the heat and tip all of the sieved flour into the saucepan and beat vigorously until a dough ball is formed in the pan. This usually takes around 2 minutes.
Next, leaving the saucepan off the heat, break the four eggs into four separate bowls and whisk until the whites and yokes are mixed together.
Now, adding one egg only to the saucepan, keeping it off the heat, mix the egg into the dough. Initially it will seem as if the egg will not mix in and look something like that on the right.
Keep mixing though and you will end up with a silky smooth pastry. Do this for all four eggs one at a time.
Add the pastry to a silicon piping bag and using a 1 cm plain nozzle pipe the choux pastry mix on to a greased baking tray. The buns should be around 3-4 cm wide and, using a wet finger push down any peaks.
The choux buns will double in size when baked so make sure you leave plenty of space between each one.
Now place in preheated oven at 200C / 180C Fan and bake for around 20 minutes or until golden brown. When baked make a small whole in the base if each profiterole to release the steam.
While the buns are baking make the chocolate sauce. To do this firstly break the chocolate and add it to the water in a saucepan.
Over a low heat melt the chocolate and then add the butter and sugar.
Keep stirring until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved. This should leave you with a lovely silky chocolate sauce.
Next, finish the profiteroles by whipping the cream (add a little vanilla essence if you like) and, using your smallest plain nozzle, pipe the cream into the profiterole through the hole in the base.
Now serve the profiteroles either altogether in a large dish, or individually in small bowls. Once cooled, pour the chocolate sauce over the profiteroles.
And there you have it. Profiteroles for your dinner party. Yum!!
It is imperative that the flour has no lumps in it so don't be afraid to sieve more than once if you are unsure.
This is probably the most critical stage. You need to add the flour all at once and immediately beat all ingredients together hard. If not the batter will become lumpy and the pastry will be of poor quality.
Make sure the choux dough has cooled a little before adding the eggs. The eggs should mix in and make the dough a silky pastry. If you add the eggs to the mix when it is too hot the eggs will scramble and the pastry will be ruined.
Leave enough space between the piped buns to allow for them to double in size when baking and not touch.
As soon as the profiteroles are done and out of the oven pierce a small whole in the base of each bun. This will release the steam from the bun and stop the profiteroles from going soggy.