French Fridays with Dorie (FFwD): Gougeres

Hooray for Dorie's new book - Around My French Table is here at last!  Which makes today, October 1st the very first day for the new group - French Fridays with Dorie (FFwD)!

Today is the first post for the group and all of October's recipe selections were chosen by Dorie herself, who is currently on tour with her new book (see the schedule here).

The first recipe for the group to make together is appropriately enough the first recipe in the book - gougeres.

These are light little cheese puff rolls made of the same type of dough (pate au choux) like cream puffs.  These really are a lot easier to make than most people tend to think - but the results are so amazing that it's hard to believe.  After all, can anything with a significant amount of gruyere melted in it not be delicious?!

I actually made the recipe twice in the past couple of weeks.  The first time we ate them with soup and the second time we just munched on them before dinner. Both times they were wonderful.  The second time I actually froze half the dough on the baking sheet. It was several days in the freezer before I ended up baking them - they had thawed a little bit before I put them in the oven to bake, but they baked up just as beautifully as the fresh batch did.

My most favorite way that I ate some of these this time was split with a little piece of leftover steak that I had - that was one heck of a little sandwich.

Make sure to visit the new French Fridays with Dorie site and see more gougeres on the Leave Your Link post.

You can also see the gougeres I posted over on Examiner.com last year that we made for a picnic.  They really are a wonderful little finger food and those ones had a little black pepper in them for an extra kick - so good!