Choux to Croquembouche:

What is a Croquembouche?

Traditionally used in celebrations, such as baptisms and weddings, a croquembouche is a tower of cream puffs, each coated in and cemented together with caramelized sugar. When cooled, the caramel, albeit fluid when hot, sets like a rock, and can be used as a glaze, decoration, or ingredient when pastry making.

It starts off with pâte à choux, a twice-cooked batter that rises in the oven to form wonderfully light, crisp, and hollow shapes, ideal for holding things like sweetened whipped cream, crème patisserie, whipped ganache, or some times ice cream. After being baked and filled, they are dipped in the cooked sugar, and placed in a(n eventually conical) ring shape. The finished product often has spun sugar draped over it, forming a net of sugar threads that are surprisingly satisfying to snap.

To start, one needs a good pâte à choux recipe. Well crusted, and thoroughly dry cream puffs are a necessity in the kitchen for this recipe, They need to firm, not flimsy or easily tearing. If the caramel glue is stronger than the cream puff, then you may end up ripping off half of a cream puff, making an unfortunate mess of the filling.

You also need a properly made caramel (the hard kind, that snaps and is brittle, but also full of flavor, without being too bitter). For this, I recommend the wet-method caramel, spoken of in a previous blog post.

And it WILL get on the counter. It's okay. Caramel is still basically sugar, just chemically changed into a myriad of variations of rearranged sugar molecules. Warm, soapy water and a light scrubbing will get it off of anything. Believe me.

A croquembouche must also be eaten the day it is made, the day after at latest. It should also never be stored in the fridge. Humidity and condensation are the reason for both of these, as moisture will melt the easily dissoluble shell of caramel, making the underlying cream puffs soggy and soft, and reducing it to a syrupy, sticky, mess. The caramel also starts to become sour, for a reason unknown to me, and becomes inedible. Others seem to be fine with it, for whatever reason. It's gross.

I use a well-greased doughnut hole pan to hold the cream puffs while they cool, to create a satisfyingly smooth, hemispherical shell. This works for cream puffs that fit the pan and those that are smaller, but if a cream puff is too big, it will form a button of caramel on top of the puff, which sticks out and is not as attractive as the perfectly smooth shell of the smaller puffs.

To start, I make a ring of caramel-dipped cream puffs on a cake stand, lined with wax paper. I drizzle them with some spun sugar, dripping extra between them, to help secure them together.

Then I dip a half of one in some hot, but not completely fluid, caramel, and attach it to a lower cream puff over a gap between them, and hold it until it (mostly) cools. Then, I do it again. And again. And again, reheating the caramel over a low burner when it starts to get too thick.

Eventually, you will get a tower of cream puffs, that glisten and reflect their amber warmth not unlike the sunset of a fall day, when the sun just recedes behind the red-orange-brown tree leaves. It's quite a beauty to look at, a beauty that can not be captured by a simple iPhone 6 camera, unfortunately.

Tragic.

It will hopefully be a cone, or perhaps a slump, like mine was, due to running out of choux before it was done. No biggy though, it's still edible, and pretty to look at.

When the tower is done , I take thread -stage* caramel and drizzle it quickly around and over the cream puffs, creating a netting of caramel threads. You can also make a nest if tightly woven threads, by making many threads at a time and rolling them together for decor at the top.

*Thread stage means that if you lift a utensil far above the pan (I lower than pan and lift my fork) remains a thread and does not drip or break. It also can't be super thick. Just cool enough to maintain a long thread, as it will cool in the air into a thin, brittle string.

And here you have it! A croquembouche ready to serve a dozen people at least. If they're hungry. Depending on the amount of cream puffs present, it can be elegantly tall, short, or a stumpy mess.

What you will need:

• At least one batch of pâte à choux

• 1 cup of caramel (Mass is equivalent to sugar amount only, not water and sugar)

• Roughly two cups of filling

Make the pâte à choux, as illustrated in a previous post, and fill them. Make a batch of caramel, also previously illustrated, slightly cooled to form a glaze. Dip the cream puffs in them with a utensil or your hands, if careful enough to not burn your fingers (I'm not). Let them cool caramel side down or in a pan with hemispherical cavities.

#choux #caramel #pastry #sweet