These vegan heart-shaped choux pastries are super cute and very delicious! Perfect to eat by yourself, with family and friends, or to share with that special someone in your life. No Valentine’s Day dessert is complete without chocolate, which is why we made sure to include both milk and white chocolate in this recipe. Bake some extra love into these desserts by making them with your significant other or a loved one! This recipe makes two heart pastries and maybe six servings, or possibly two–depending on how much you love pastry! Make your Valentine’s Day special and give these a try!
The chocolate we used in this recipe are the vanilla bean white chocolate and coconut milk chocolate bars from Charm School Chocolate. We also used our own recipe for vegan chocolate pastry cream in the filling.
If you try this recipe, leave us a comment below to let us know how it goes. We would love to hear from you!
Vegan Valentine’s Day Choux Pastries
Heart-shaped choux pastries topped with white chocolate and filled with sweet chocolate pastry cream.
Equipment
- 2 or 3 piping bags
- 2 mixing bowls
- rubber spatula
- serrated knife
- small saucepan
- half sheet baking tray
- parchment paper
- pencil
- electric hand mixer with whisk attachment
Ingredients
Chocolate Pastry Cream
Choux Pastry
- ¼ cup water
- ¼ cup unsweetened soy milk
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- ½ tbsp sugar
- 3 ½ tbsp butter
- ½ cup flour
- ½ cup Just Egg (mix with the soy milk amount below)
- ¼ cup unsweetened soy milk
Whipped Cream
- 1 cup Silk heavy whipping cream
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
Topping
- 1 bar vegan white chocolate (60g)
- red oil-based or gel food coloring (a few drops)
- 1 handful almonds (optional)
Instructions
Make the chocolate pastry cream first.
- You can prepare the pastry cream the day before if you'd like. Place it in a piping bag and leave in the fridge until needed.
Make the choux dough.
- Prepare and gather the ingredients for the choux pastry. Using the second listed amount of soy milk, mix it together with the Just Egg. Set aside for later.
- Combine the water, soy milk, vanilla extract, sugar, and butter in a small saucepan on medium heat. Mix it with a rubber spatula until the butter dissolves and then leave it for a few minutes until it starts to simmer.
- Once the liquid ingredients begin to simmer, carefully add in all the flour. Turn the heat to low. Continue to mix until the flour is incorporated and no white flour spots remain. The mix will thicken into a dough and almost form a ball. It should come off the sides of the pan easily. This shouldn’t take more than about 3 minutes.
- Scoop the dough out of the pan and into a mixing bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer. Avoid using a plastic bowl as the dough will be hot. Smash the dough down and flatten it to help release the heat. Leave it to cool for a few minutes. Alternatively, you can mix the dough over some ice or some ice packs to help it cool more quickly. You can also mix the dough for a few minutes in a stand mixer with a paddle attachment.
- Once your dough is just barely warm or room temperature, add in the Just Egg mixture a few tablespoons at a time. The amount is up to you. We’re just trying to avoid mixing a ball of dough sitting in egg soup—that would be more difficult to mix! Mix it with the rubber spatula and allow it to fully incorporate in between each addition. The final consistency should just barely run off the spatula and look pipe-able. Add more soy milk a tablespoon at a time if your mixture is still too thick.
- Preheat the oven to 400°F.
- Scoop the choux mixture into a piping bag with a 1/2 inch opening or smooth tip.
- TIP: If using reusable piping bags, you can close the open end of the bag by the tip with a pastry bag tie.
- Then place the piping bag into a tall glass to help you fill it more easily.
- Next, tie the back end of the bag.
Prepare the baking tray.
- Line a half sheet tray with parchment paper. On one half of the parchment paper, draw a square that is 6 inches on all sides.
- Then draw a heart, however you'd like, inside the square. Make sure the top, sides, and bottom point of the heart touch the sides of the square.
- Fold the parchment paper in half and trace the heart onto the other half on the parchment paper. (I traced the square first, before I realized I only needed the heart. oopsie.)
- Unfold the parchment paper and flip it over so that the pencil-marked side is facing down.
- Pipe a tiny little bit of the choux dough onto each corner of the baking tray underneath the parchment paper. This will help to keep it from sliding around as you pipe the hearts.
Pipe the hearts.
- Keeping the tip close to the tray, squeeze continuously and pipe a strip of the mixture all along the outline of the heart. It should also be about 1 inch wide.NOTE: Pipe slowly! If you pipe too quickly, you're going to make a thin strip of dough!
- Pipe a second layer onto both hearts. This vegan choux dough doesn't puff up a ton like non-vegan choux. So the second layer is to help give it some extra height. There should be enough mixture to make two double-layer heart pastries.
- Wet the tip of your finger and gently smooth out the seams. You can also sharpen the shape of the inside tip and bottom tips of each heart.
Bake.
- Place the tray in the oven on the middle rack. Bake for 40-45 minutes until completely deep golden brown. Do not open the oven at all until the last few minutes of baking. The pastry needs consistent heat for the moisture to turn to steam and cause them to rise.This is what they looked like about half-way through baking. I had enough dough left over to make one cream puff haha.
- After 45 minutes, turn off the oven and leave the door open a bit. Leave the hearts in there for 10 minutes. Make the whipped cream while they are cooling.
Make the whipped cream.
- Pour the whipping cream, sugar, and vanilla extract into a mixing bowl. Add a few drops of red or pink gel food coloring until you get the color you want. We also added ½ teaspoon of natural strawberry extract for a fun flavor.
- Whisk with an electric hand mixer until stiff peaks form.
- Place it into a piping bag and put it into the fridge to keep it cool until you need it.
Prepare the white chocolate.
- Break up the white chocolate and place into a microwave-safe bowl. Heat the chocolate in 20-second intervals until it is melted. Mix it to make it smooth and melt any remaining little lumps. You can also use a double-boiler method, but we find this a lot easier.
- Add a few drops of red food coloring at a time until you get a color that you like. Mix it well. If your chocolate is starting to harden again or becoming grainy, pop it back into the microwave for a few seconds at a time.NOTE: Oil-based food coloring is the best to use with chocolate. We didn't have any though, and gel food coloring worked pretty well. Chocolate and water do not like each other. If you use water-based food coloring it will make your chocolate grainy.
Assemble the pastries.
- After ten minutes, remove the pastries from the oven. They will still be warm. Using a serrated knife, cut them in half horizontally, so that they can be filled.
- TIP: Our hearts were only baked for 40 minutes. They could have used another 5 minutes to reduce the bit of wet dough left on the bottom. If yours looks like this, you can easily scrape some of the dough from the bottom with a small spoon.
- Pipe a layer of the chocolate pastry cream into the bottom half of each heart. Not the top halves. We used a star-tipped nozzle, but you can make it look however you want.
- Pipe a second layer of chocolate pastry cream.
- Pipe a layer of the pink whipped cream on top of the chocolate pastry cream. We used a star-tipped nozzle again and made little swirls.
- Carefully place the top halves onto each heart. Using a small spoon, spatula, or butter knife, spread some of the colored white chocolate onto the top.
- If you'd like, you can also chop up a few almonds and sprinkle them onto the top of each heart.
- You can eat the hearts as they are now, or you can place them into the fridge for a few minutes to allow the white chocolate to harden. We hope you like these as much as we do!
