6. Make a Croquembouche

What is a croquembouche, you say? It’s an extremely insane looking French pastry tower that I’ve always wanted to try. And I’m going to make one!

Croquembouche is a French name for the dish that means “crunch in the mouth” since it’s composed of nearly a hundred bite sized pastries filled with cream and covered in caramel that are supposed to crunch as you bite into them. All arranged in a tree-like tower, and decorated with strings of caramel.

We are going to be fancy.

I found a recipe that seemed fairly straightforward. I have experience with choux pastry and that’s that bulk of this adventure, so I was feeling okay about the prep at least. Since it takes about 6 hours to make all the different pieces, I started the night before by making all of the individual choux “shells”. About a hundred of them. So. Many. But they can be stored for 1-2 days at room temperature, so this lengthy process of piping a hundred 1.5 inch circles of choux can at least be done ahead of time.

I had to do three rounds of choux shells, and decided to stick with the traditional vanilla filling, so two parts of this adventure are finished!

The assembly is an entire separate adventure, so I left that until the 2 hours or so before I planned to have it ready. I toasted the shells in the oven for five minutes to crisp them again, and then carved a hole in the bottom of each. I whipped up the pastry cream and put it in a piping bag. As I was filling the bag, I got a little concerned about the amount of pastry cream, since there were a LOT of shells to fill, I started piping the shells and made it about 3/4 the way through before I ran out, so note to self, make a double batch.

I next started making the caramel, and made the mistake of stirring it a bit too much before reading the instructions, and got concerned about having crystallized the sugar, and started another 3/4 batch in case. But the original batch carmelized nicely and I pulled it aside to start using to construct the croquembouche. And here friends, is where I started really injuring myself. Because molten caramel is hazardous. I first started using my fingers to dip the pastries, and after getting caramel on my fingers, immediately switch to tongs. Because as bad a getting burned is, getting burned by sticky, molten sugar makes I much worse. As I worked the Carmel kept getting darker and I realized too late, that it was continuing to cook (and burn) as I worked.

So while I constructed the croquembouche (with a few burns) the caramel about halfway up the tree was burned, and didn’t taste very nice. All well, this was just a proof of concept really, and now I have lots of good notes for the next time I want to construct this (if ever). I got my recipe from The Spruce Eats, and I have made a lot of notes and adjustments so that you can follow along (and hopefully avoid burning yourself as many times as I did)!

But overall a lot of fun to try, and the vanilla pastry cream was delicious!