First Daring Baker Entry!

Well ya'll, I feel like a true internet baking geek now! I've joined the Daring Bakers Blog. If you don't know what that is, check it out. People all over the world band together once a month to all make the same thing. Then they are all able to compare and contrast experiences and learn from the masses mistakes and successes.
To be honest, I wasn't thrilled with the subject. Probably because eclairs are one of my least favorite tasks at work. I pretty much always avoid making them in hopes some other sorry sucker will get signed up for it. It's just such a long and messy process... That and I rarely have time to do much that isn't cake/cupcake related these days. The recipe we use is quite large, 32 eggs large if my memory is right. Piping out that many eclairs takes forever, and gets you and everything around you quite sticky. And while it may be fun to get sticky in certain situations, this is most definantly not one of them.
So I dragged my feet about making these. Then on my day off when I decided it was time to finish this challenge, I woke to discover we were out of milk and eggs! So, I finally got around to this at about midnight last night.
The dough was quite soft compared to normal. I perhaps should have cooked it longer or added one less egg. But I was trying to ignore my normal habit of altering recipes in an attempt to be obedient to the challenge. The baking temperature seemed quite low, but I also resisted my impulse to turn up the oven. It therefor took an eternity for them to bake. But in the end they were decent looking little buggers.
I opted to fill them with chocolate caramel mousse instead of the pastry cream, because I've been in a crazy mousse mood lately. Just can't get enough of the stuff. Which is probably not a good thing for my waist line...
I was a little too tired to be patient, so the mousse was soft and the glaze thin. All of which made them less than spectacular to look upon. But tasty non the less. Hopefully next month I'll get a little more into it. But then, next month I'm getting married and school has just started. So in reality, I'll probably be too busy until midnight the night before it's due, once again.