‘Terribly chic’: how to make chouquettes

I have become obsessed with the French idea of goûter, the time in the afternoon when French schoolchildren have a sweet treat to tide them over from the end of the school day until dinner. It’s just teatime, really, a pause for an afternoon snack – my kid has the same, but we don’t have such an elegant word for it (and his tends to be a gobbled Babybel, and rejected cucumber sticks, which is far less fun) – but giving it its own distinct name and place in the day is charming.

Actually I think I’m just always looking for an excuse for another snack; always happy to introduce extra little codified meal times to my daily life – not just goûter, but Swedish fika (a kind of ritualised coffee break, morning or afternoon), Italian aperitivo hour (to mark the end of the working day), perhaps a German Kaffee und Kuchen (traditionally mid-afternoon). No thank you, though, to brunch which elides two meals into one, rather than introducing an extra snacking hour.

The most beloved goûter for French children is squares of dark chocolate in a piece of buttered baguette, but I think I’d be stretching the limits of recipe writing to give you instructions for that. Also popular, however, are chouquettes.

Chouquettes are small choux puffs, decorated just with pearl sugar – a small, opaque, crunchy nibbed sugar that looks like snowfall. Pearl sugar is now relatively widely available in British supermarkets, often in its Swedish form, parlsocker. The chouquettes are about the size of a golf ball, and designed to be simple mouthfuls, crisp and impossibly light. Even the name is adorable, with the ‘ette’ indicating their small size. It sounds like the name of an animal sidekick in a modern Disney film (perhaps an owl?).