Cream puffs are small balls of baked dough filled with cream. The “puff” part of the name refers to how the pastry dough puffs up into a craggy bun while it is baking. Cream puffs look difficult to make because they seem so fragile -- not to mention they tend to appear in elegant arrays of pastries. They also sometimes look like a thin shell of pastry completely surrounding the filling, making it look like somehow the pastry was baked around the filling. Filling cream puffs can actually happen by one of two methods: either stuff the tip of a pastry bag into the puff and fill carefully, or simply cut the puff open and spoon some filling into the center.
