Croquembouche, Food Network Magazine December 2009
We had a potluck to go to today, so for some excitement my mom encouraged me to make a croquembouche. Essentially, a croquembouche is a pyramid of cream puffs held together with a hard caramel candy. This one had cream puffs filled with vanilla cream or chocolate-coffee cream.
This recipe has several preps and several coolings, but it manages to fit together somehow (especially with Mom as a sous chef!) We started with the cream fillings, which take 12 egg yolks! We used vanilla extract instead of beans but otherwise followed the recipe as normal. While that cooled we had some lunch and then started making the choux pastry. Choux pastry is kind of strange because it gets cooked in a saucepan for a bit, which I don't think happens with most doughs. Instead of piping it, I just scooped it onto the parchment-paper-lined sheets and then smoothed it out. Luckily, it still puffed up beautifully! I poked holes in them and set them to cool.
While those cooled we went on a walk, and by the time we returned it was time to finish the filling and assemble. The puddingy filling gets softened out with whipping cream (whipped to soft peaks). Our vanilla filling had set up quite well because it was in a wide, shallow dish, so it was pretty hard to "fold in" to the soft whipped cream. It was also hard to pipe into the pastries, maybe because of the clumps. The chocolate filling on the other hand was in a narrow, deep dish, and was still almost luke-warm after a couple hours in the fridge. It folded into the whipped cream beautifully and piped easily.
While I filled the pastries Mom started the caramel-- just sugar, water, and some corn syrup. Once that was done, I just dipped the cream puffs into the caramel and tried to get them to stick together, then flailed some more caramel around to try to get the "spun" sugar. It didn't quite make the thin strands that it's supposed to (well, this happened, and one poked Mom, but they didn't happen when they were supposed to), but it still looked nice. And everything got eaten!
This evening I am having tea in one of the cups that had rock-hard caramel coating the bottom and it is very sweet! I think this caramel would make nice lollipops. It made really cool patterns as it cooled.
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