Hot Dog Eclairs Are the Most Beautiful Thing You Never Knew You Wanted

This first appeared on MUNCHIES in July 2017.

"Y'all know redneck rolls?"

The giant pitmaster rubbing massive slabs of brisket in the background for a event later that night raises an eyebrow and looks over at the Chinese-American woman talking about Jimmy Dean's breakfast sausage in a sweet-as-honey, Lowcountry-by-way-of-Alabama drawl while arranging hot dogs vertically in a configuration that resembles genuinely nothing more than a bouquet of dicks.

But that's Cynthia Wong's whole thing. She's a fancy-as-hell pastry chef—she bounced around a bunch of very soigné restaurants in the South (and the UK too) until landing in her current spot, as the Executive Pastry Chef for the Charleston/Nashville-based Butcher & Bee—who thinks "it's fun to be twee with really stupid stuff." So when we asked her what she wanted to make she came back at us with a eclair filled with pureed hot dogs: "This is just for VICE. Anybody else would have laughed at me."

The pastry itself is pretty straightforward: it's a classic pâte à choux dough, with a tiny bit of sugar and a couple extra egg whites for crispness, piped into eclair shapes and baked till dark.

Once they're done, they're split, then the tops get glazed with a quick cheesy bechamel (Wong prefers Gruyere, but today we kept it classy with American) and popped back in the oven to set.

Meanwhile, the hot dog mousse gets made. Wong whips hot dogs in a food processor with a whack of softened butter, and in her best Ina voice, deadpans, "Jeffrey loves it when I make hot dog mousse."

She's sourced two different colors of hot dogs for the occasion, and was hoping to layer them in the piping bag for a barber-pole-esque-swirl, but her hopes are foiled when both purees are basically the same color of naked-mole-rat-pink.

Assembly is straightforward: Wong pipes hot dog mousse into the bottom of each eclair, then announces "we're gonna tweeze this."

So then the meat paste gets a tweezer-perfect topping of diced white onions and thinly sliced gherkins. The cheese-glazed top goes on that, and then the tweezers come back out to place dill, chive blossoms, and snipped chives on top.

They're perfect, of course, but Wong's not satisfied: "I meant to do a swan! I was going to make you a hot dog swan!" Because the only thing that could have made this any better would have been a creamed hot dog swan. Obviously.