The Eclair Cake Recipe I Want to Make on Repeat

If I could eat an éclair every day, I’d be a very happy woman. Unfortunately, I do not live in France, nor I am not located near a French bakery—and I most certainly do not have the time or energy to make éclairs frequently at home. I reserve éclairs for special occasions, and even then it’s hard to convince myself it’s worth piping, baking, filling, and glazing an entire tray of little fingers of choux pastry. The good news is that there are two different ways of making large-format éclair cakes that evoke the original without prompting your carpal tunnel to flare up.

How to Make a Classic Éclair Cake

A classic éclair is a refined confection of golden choux filled with pastry cream and glazed with chocolate, but the thing most people think of when they hear “éclair cake” is decidedly less formal: An icebox cake in which graham crackers are layered with boxed pudding mix, refrigerated until softened, then topped with store-bought chocolate frosting.

That’s all well and good, and we appreciate an easy dessert that can feed a crowd while requiring literally no investment of time or skill to whip together. But if you need a recipe to explain how to fill a baking dish with boxed pudding, boxed crackers, and boxed frosting, then we’ve got a really great recipe for boiling water to show you next! No, this is Serious Eats, so we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna be just a little more ambitious—just enough to transform something extremely ho-hum into something still relatively easy but significantly more delicious.

Instead of instant pudding, we are using an airy mixture of whipped cream and vanilla-bean infused pastry cream. To sound fancy, we could use the French terms “crème pâtissière” for the pastry cream and “crème légère” for the mixture of the pastry cream with the whipped cream, but in the spirit of this shamelessly Americanized dessert, we’ll stick with the English here, thank you very much, mon frère.

For those who came here expecting boxed pudding mix, don’t run away just yet! We promise, pastry cream may sound like the kind of thing that requires a culinary school degree to make, but it’s so simple, and so, so much better. You can do it, and now’s the time.

As for the chocolate, we skip the ready-made frosting and opt for a simple semi-sweet ganache instead, which brings a pleasant bitterness that balances the dessert. “Ganache” is another word that may send some running to the nearest aisle of Betty Crocker (no hate, no hate), but please stay. If you can heat butter and cream and pour it over dark chocolate, you can make ganache. (In fact, if you do that, you will have, by definition, made ganache. It’s easy, I promise.)

The graham crackers remain the graham crackers: We get it, the brilliant ease of this recipe is that there’s no baking involved, and we’re staying true to that.

How to Make What Is, Essentially, a Giant Éclair

Okay, but this is Serious Eats, and you don’t think we’re just gonna pump out a slightly jazzed-up recipe for an éclair cake and call it a day, did you? It’s called an éclair cake, and last we checked, the defining element of an éclair is that it’s made from choux pastry. So we asked a simple question: Can we super-size it?

And yes, yes we can. This is the show-stopper version, and it is designed to impress.

Taking our inspiration from the classic Paris-Brest, in which choux is baked in a large ring and then filled with praline cream, this version fills the ring with vanilla crème mousseline and is then topped with a glossy chocolate glaze.

This version of the recipe is, without question, more complicated. But let’s look at the facts: First, it’s still easier than making traditional éclairs, since one large choux pastry ring is easier to pipe and bake than many individual choux fingers. Second, we’ve already made the choux part of the process easier for you with the help of science. Instead of the vague instructions in most recipes, we use precise temperatures that you can easily measure with a thermometer for perfect choux every time, no guesswork involved.

As with the American éclair cake recipe described above, pastry cream once again has a starring role here, this time in the form of crème mousseline, or what I like to call fancy buttercream: Instead of beating butter with powdered sugar to make buttercream, we beat pastry cream into the butter. Whipped until light and fluffy, the filling’s velvety texture complements the crisp, airy choux.

Last but not least, there’s an easy chocolate glaze of butter, corn syrup, and semi-sweet chocolate that comes together in one bowl with the help of the microwave. The dessert tastes just like an éclair, except you can cut it in big, hulking slices to serve to friends or, let’s be honest, keep it all to yourself because that’s the real spirit of an Americanized dessert: Making it big and then eating too much.

No matter which version you decide to make, the important thing to remember is: There’s a confection for every occasion, even if the occasion is sitting on your couch alone with a giant éclair cake.