Cream Puff

cream puff a delicate confection consisting of a round choux pastry shell filled with whipped cream (or, sometimes, crème pâtissière). These puffs have an obvious relationship with profiteroles (which are smaller) and éclairs (which are a different shape).

Cream puffs may be dusted with icing sugar. This certainly applied to the cream puffs in a famous story, ‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield, referred to by Barbara Maher (1982); they were ‘beautifully light and feathery’, and Cook shook off the extra icing sugar as she arranged them. However, the puffs are sometimes iced, e.g. with a chocolate icing.