A Towering Achievement: My Croquembouche

Readers, I am painfully aware of having neglected this blog over the past few weeks. Please bear with me: I'm smack bang in the middle of my last ever Masters degree subject and will sit my exam in two weeks. In times like this I am ordinarily tempted by distraction, and I would much prefer to be tapping away here telling you all about my cooking adventures (or in the kitchen creating things about which to report) but this time I must resist - I really want to end my ten years of university study on a high note!

Posting will be scarce until the exam is over with, but please don't forget about me!

To keep you interested and tide you over until I can return, I'll recount a little tale of inspiration and achievement...

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A few weeks ago a post by Not Quite Nigella touched on a nerve (in a good way!), and I was inspired to set myself a challenge. For some time I've been wanting to launch into the world of pastry and I've made more than a few glib remarks about baking profiteroles (most recently when, at a restaurant, Mr W&W was served some which had been microwaved into a disappointingly soggy mess). Now, I have not made choux paste previously and I am on pretty shaky ground with pastry generally, but when Lorraine posted about her Croquembouche class in the week leading up to a little birthday get-together we hosted for my husband's family, I was inspired to put myself to task and jump in at the deep end!

Behold, my first (and, most likely, last) croquembouche:

I don't propose posting the recipes I used to create this tower of choux goodness, but I am happy to share if anyone particularly wants them. Really, you just need yourself a good recipe for choux paste, a simple pastry cream recipe and you need to make some caramel, which I did by mixing 2 parts sugar to one part water and setting over heat until it is lovely and golden. A Google search should turn up some decent recipes for the component parts.

For my choux I followed the recipe in my much pawed but never before used Le Cordon Bleu Dessert Techniques book and I adapted the creme patissiere recipe in that book also. Basically, I made three flavours of the cream filling - vanilla, grand marnier and chocolate. The chocolate was made by stirring some melted 70% cocoa chocolate through half of the vanilla custard. The grand marnier was made as a batch of its own - I spiked the milk used to make the custard with some grated orange zest and I stirred through a good splosh of grand marnier at the very end.

Overall, I think it's fair to say that the croquembouche was time consuming although actually not as difficult as I'd expected. The individual parts are relatively simple and much can be made ahead - it was the construction that was the real challenge for me.

I made my choux buns on the Friday for my Saturday party, and I also made the three batches of pastry cream in advance. I freshened the choux buns up in the oven on the Saturday morning, allowing them to cool before piping in the filling. I also whipped some thickened cream through each batch of custard to create a lighter, richer filling (and to stretch the custard further).

Somewhat dangerously, I left the construction until very shortly before my guests were due to arrive. I was particularly mindful of blog posts I'd read in preparation for this project which indicated that the toffee does not stand up well to humidity and moisture. The day of our event was quite a hot one and I did not want my choux tower collapsing before the party began!

My croquembouche was constructed around a papier maché Witch's Hat found at Lincraft (presumably stocked for Halloween crafts). I certainly did not need an expensive, professional Croquembouche Cone - I simply covered my paper substitute with baking paper and gave it a misting of olive oil spray before construction.

The worst part of assembling the tower was joining the first 'ring' of buns at the base - it was difficult to get them to stick together and not collapse. Regrettably, I also had trouble remembering that I was dealing with hot sugar syrup! There were a few times where I clutched at the little buns to stop them tumbling and yelped as I realised I'd plunged my bare hands into piping hot toffee! Ouch! I dunked my knuckle in the scalding sugar syrup at one point in the course of assembly and, weeks later, I still have a wound which is healing. This part of the process is dangerous work and, whilst I tried to mitigate injury and use a pair of tongs, these quickly became too sticky with the syrup and were of little help.

Now I have to say whilst construction is the most difficult bit, it is really only the bottom few levels which are the toughest. Once you start moving up the cone, gravity assists in keeping the cream puffs where you want them to be, and it becomes a much quicker process.

Yes, this is definitley a "wow factor" dessert and I think my guests were suitably impressed by it. More importantly, however, the little buns were delicious. The pastry was rich and buttery, filled with a billowy light and creamy custard, and enclosed in a thin, crispy toffee shell. The combination of textures here is a real treat! Realistically, you need a reasonable crowd for this dessert as it is best enjoyed on the day it is constructed - the next day I found the toffee had softened and the buns had absorbed the custard's moisture. We had a lot of leftovers which weren't that great (a bit like Mr W&W's soggy microwaved ones which partially inspired the project!), so it would be much better if you had quite a few people to devour this at first sitting.

A big thanks to the un-knowing instigator of this project, Lorraine at NQN, whose posts are always inspiring but her croquembouche tale in particular led me to embark on this challenge. Lorraine's choux tower is much more polished than mine with its lovely spun sugar and floral adornment, not to mention her neat and even distribution of buns, but I'm pretty pleased with my little attempt.

Well friends, that's it for me today - I'm going to put my nose back in the text books and I hope to be back soon with some great new recipes to share. Don't be strangers, keep checking back for updates.

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By the way, thank you all for taking the time to leave me a comment over the last few posts - there have been a lot more than usual lately which I think is due to Foodbuzz traffic. It's nice to know there are people out there having a look at this blog, so keep the comments coming!