I think of pate au choux as being a peculiarly 1980s dessert, because all of the cookbooks I have picked up from that time include it in their general dessert section, right alongside chocolate chip cookies and apple pie.  Which is pretty peculiar, considering that I'm pretty sure I have never been served a pate au choux dessert by a civilian.  (I have eaten many of them at restaurants and bakeries, though.  Many many.)

Despite my personal insistence that pate a choux is a 1980s dessert, it was actually invented in 1540 by a chef in the court of Catherine de Medici.  He used it to make a cake, and later French cooks tweaked the recipe.  In its final form, a baker used it to make little sweet buns, which were said to resemble cabbages, or choux.

Pate au choux is a kind of dough, light and fluffy and tender, which is used in éclairs, beignets, profiteroles, French crullers, and more.  To make a cruller, you pipe out the dough and deep fry it.  To make a beignet, you pipe out the dough and then fry it even longer, then serve it dusted with powdered sugar.  (Oh how I wish I was in New Orleans, as I type this!  I want a beignet desperately right at this moment.)  

Choux pastry is baked for both profiteroles and éclairs.  For éclairs, a filling is then injected in through the end.  Profiteroles can be filled with pastry cream either through injection, or by slicing it slightly and dolloping the filling in with a gentle hand.

I experimented with pate aux choux once.  It was quite a rollicking and messy weekend, I can assure you!  I made something halfway between éclairs and profiteroles, depending on how you define the form.  I didn't really have a pastry bag, and I hadn't yet learned to nip off the corner of a Ziplock bag to fake it.  So I was dropping my dough onto a pastry sheet, then trying to pat it into place with a butter knife.

Even though I was terribly inexperienced in the kitchen, my experiments turned out fairly well.  (Ugly, but fairly well.)  The pastry itself is simple to make, you simply have to work fast through the various steps, and be careful not to over-mix anything.

You can use almost anything to fill your choux pastries.  In a hurry, you can use Cool Whip or other whipped topping.  The classic French pastry filling is something akin to a custard, using whopping amounts of heavy cream, sugar, and eggs.  I found this excellent tutorial on both the choux pastry and the classic filling, which looks like what I had made.

One thing I found was that my lumpy little pastries did not last long, even in the refrigerator.  The pastry tends to be tender and damp, and once you fill it, the whole thing becomes a sodden mess.  Delicious, but soggy.  No one wants soggy pastry!  If you have to hold them over, make the pastry ahead of time, then fill them right before serving.  Yum!

Picture courtesy of Flickr user Marylise Doctrinal.