Choux pastry

Choux pastry, or (), is a delicate pastry dough used in many pastries. It contains only butter, water, flour, and eggs. Instead of a raising agent, it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry. The pastry is used in many European and European-derived cuisines.
History.
According to some cookbooks, a chef by the name of Pantarelli or Pantanelli invented the dough in 1540, seven years after he left Florence with Catherine de' Medici and her court. He used the dough to make a gâteau and named it . Over time, the recipe of the dough evolved, and the name changed to , which was used to make , small cakes made in the shape of a woman's breasts. These were made from dough that had been dried over a fire, called .
Then Avice, a in the eighteenth century, and made modifications to the recipe, resulting in the recipe most commonly used now for profiteroles.
Essential ingredients and manner of rising.
The ingredients for choux pastry are butter, water, flour and eggs. Like Yorkshire pudding or David Eyre's pancake, instead of a raising agent, it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry. The high moisture content is achieved by boiling the water and butter, then adding the flour. The mixture is cooked a few minutes longer, then cooled before adding enough eggs to achieve the desired consistency. The boiling step causes the starch in the flour to gel, allowing the incorporation of more water.
Foods made with choux pastry.
This pastry is used to make choux (small puffs), as the name implies, but also profiteroles, , éclairs, , French crullers, , St. Honoré cake, Parisian gnocchi, dumplings and gougères.
Choux pastry is usually baked but for beignets it is fried. In Spain and Latin America, churros are made of fried choux pastry, sugared and dipped in a thick hot chocolate for breakfast. In Italian cuisine, choux pastry is the base for zeppole di San Giuseppe which are cream-filled pastries eaten on March 19th for the feast of Saint Joseph. In Austrian cuisine, one variation of , a sweet apricot dumpling cooked in simmering water, uses choux pastry; in that case it does not puff, but remains relatively dense. Choux pastries are sometimes filled with cream after baking to make cream puffs or éclairs.
A , a diminutive of , is a small, round, hollow choux pastry covered with large-grain sugar. 
A is covered in a "crackly" sugar topping — and often filled with pastry cream, much like éclairs.