How to make profiteroles with an Asian twist – just add coconut, pandan and Malaysian palm sugar

Profiteroles – ice cream or cream filled puffs – are a classic French dessert that almost everyone likes. Usually, the ice cream is vanilla and the profiteroles are served with a rich, warm chocolate sauce for a lovely hot-cold temperature contrast.

In this recipe, the dessert gets a Southeast Asian treatment, with ice cream made of coconut milk and fragrant pandan leaf, and rich, deeply flavoured caramel made with gula melaka.

Coconut-pandan ice cream profiteroles with gula melaka caramel

Gula melaka is the Malaysian version of the Southeast Asian sugar made from palm sap, usually from coconut palms. The clear sap is simmered until it’s thick and deep brown before being poured into moulds to solidify. When I make caramel with granulated sugar, I go by colour – the white sugar cooks to a dark amber. Gula melaka is dark amber to start with, so you can’t go by colour but need to use a thermometer to check it’s simmered long enough.

I like to make the ice cream with fresh pandan leaves, but they are not easy to find outside Asia. Alternatively, use pandan extract. The ice cream contains a small amount of rum, which prevents it from freezing too hard. If you avoid alcohol, omit the rum and substitute a small amount of egg white, adding it to the ice cream base just before processing it in the ice cream machine. (If you don’t have a machine, buy coconut ice cream.)

Recipes for choux paste – the versatile dough used for cream puffs and eclairs – call for varying amounts of egg. It’s hard to give the exact amount, because it depends on the moisture content of the paste: if you cook it a little longer on the stovetop and stir it to let the steam escape, it will absorb more egg, and it puffs up better – but if you use too much egg, the paste won’t puff up at all.

Here, you have extra egg whites from making the ice cream, some of which you can add to the paste instead of whisking an egg and using just part of it.