Choux Pastry Puns

Title

I am new to baking! Just started earlier this year and have been baking through Dessert Person. I've had success so far but repeatedly have issues with the Choux dough.

My pastries come out nice and golden, looking fluffy. Yet when I take them out of the oven, they deflate down to concave disks. The dough tastes nice and is flaky inside, but is dense and not the correct texture.

I have been following Claire's recipe, but only add 4 eggs to get that ribbony texture. My oven runs hot so this time I preheated to 425, then turned it to 350 after putting in the dough and baked for just shy of 30 minutes.

Can anyone give me pointers for what could be going wrong? Am I missing something simple or is this a difficult dough?

I'm contributing to a family gathering and couldn't quite figure out how much to make. It'd be a leisurely buffet of an outdoor barbecue. I've settled on apple-compote mascarpone, a shrimp cream salad and craqueline with vanilla cream, but i couldn't decide on the amount.

My regular contribution is usually 2kg worth of flour of various sweet and savoury bread, however this year a relative asked for choux pastry. The goal is for the pastries not to run short if 50 people did turn up, ample leftovers for 30 people are fine.

OK so I've spent like most of today in the kitchen making test batches of choux puffs. I made one that turned out pretty good, puffed up nicely, was hollow, generally a success. Then on the next batch added craquelin and boom. Flat, doughy, sad little things that were concave on the bottom. Both batches were from the same dough and didn't really change anything with the temp or baking time. They just... failed. And I've had a few spectacular failures now specifically when I've used craquelin.

What could be going wrong? I'm honestly at a loss 😞

I'm looking to make a choux craquelin and I would like for my choux pastry to be strong enough to hold cream for a longer period of time. Looking at ones sold at Bibble and Sip in NY , the choux looks stronger and thicker than your average choux craquelin. I'm guessing this helps it hold the pastry cream for longer periods of time without getting soggy. Does anyone know how I can go about doing this?

I’m a traditionally trained pastry chef but I’m vegan so I like veganizing all sorts of recipes (from classics to pastry basics) but I’m just curious to know what people want to be able to make or have! I have an ongoing list of things I want to veganize but what would you want to see? Or what do you find is lacking in vegan blogs in general? Including everything from the recipes themselves to their explanations. Let me know your thoughts!

I've been baking choux for a few years now, but always using an old family recipe. When looking for inspiration/recipes online, I noticed something: the hydration of the doughs is so much higher!

My recipe uses 150g flour, 125ml Water and 100g Butter. Anything I've found online starts at least twice the amount of liquid. When trying one of these recipes, I found that the dough was a lot more prone to splitting and that I had to cook it for a lot longer to get to what I know as the signs of it being cooked enough (a layer of dough sticking to my pot). I actually went back to using my own recipe, and only using the craquelin and filling part of recipes.

My question: Why do most recipes use such high hydration? Why is the hydration necessary? I feel like working with a lower hydration is much easier and the texture doesn't seem to be affected.