Stuff Happiness Is Made Of

Croquembouche

I have always wanted to make a croquembouche, but never had the courage to do it alone. What if my profiteroles didn't rise? What if my profiterole tower collapsed? There were so many possible catastrophes I didn't want to face.

Anyway, my pastry chef friend decided to come and teach me the fine arts of making a croquembouche and my friend came along as well as part of the training team. We set out together to deal with it.

First we had to make the profiteroles. Profiteroles are made of choux pastry and filled with any sort of filling. In our case, we used whipped ganache (cream and chocolate). After struggling with piping and filling, the next thing to do was the exciting part - assembling the croquembouche.

Croqeumbouche towers are actually hollow - something I never knew. There's a base that we build the croquembouche around and once the chocolate sets, we take the base off - leaving it hollow.



Croquembouche Tower - The undecorated croquembouche, coated with plain chocolate.

Next thing we did was to dust with icing sugar, creating a snowy mountain sort of look.



Snowy Mountain

Then we added the decoration, which was white chocolate butterflies. I'm particularly proud of them. Here are not one, but the two croquembouche we made. One for myself and one for my friend. None for the pastry chef. :P



Croquembouche 1



Croquembouche 2



Two of them together - Two mountains set side by side.

Guess which was assembled by the pastry chef and which by us?

Anyway, here are some close ups of the butterflies, because I think they turned out really well.



White Chocolate Butterflies - Just sitting and waiting to be attached. These took a lot of patience and a steady unwavering hand.





Butterflies - Aren't they pretty??

All in all, I had a great time making them, although I'm not sure if I would want to do it again. It was very time consuming (it took us 6 hours in all to finish making everything, including cleaning up and waiting for it to bake and dinner) but then, the results were pretty breathtaking.

My final say is - I love the butterflies. Lol.

Labels: Cakes

posted by Baking Fairy at 11:25 PM