Conquering Croquembouche
Croquembouche is a pastry challenge to behold - a freestanding tower of rich yet impossibly light, crisp choux pastry puffs (aka profiteroles, or choux à la crème) filled with some variation of decadent creamy filling, held together with shiny caramel. A shelf life of just a few hours further complicates the project as one that could only be worth creating for a crowd. While not the most complicated and technical pastry project out there, significant time investment and short shelf life have made this project one I have not been particularly enthused about making until a celebratory time like the holidays.
Basic choux puffs are easy enough for an average baking enthusiast when you know what to look for, even with the craquelin cookie top. Piping them into even sizes and ensuring a healthy oven spring creates a hollow space for a respectable quantity of cream to take residence. Taking cue from Claire Saffitz’s recipe in her book Dessert Person, I measured my 1 inch cookie cutter to cut out exactly 1-inch circles of craquelin to cover my 1-inch blobs of choux pastry. For the choux batter, I used 5 out of the 6 eggs called for, and my resulting baked puffs were small as advertised. However, upon checking Claire’s YouTube video, it seemed that 1 inch was too small, and perhaps 1.25 or 1.5 inches would have been a more appropriate size, as it was very difficult to fill such tiny cream puffs.
I filled the puffs with chocolate pastry cream as instructed in the book. I then turned to making the caramel - I used Jacquy Pfeiffer’s recipe from one of my favorite books - The Art of French Pastry - which uses corn syrup to discourage crystallization. Making the caramel is relatively straightforward, but using the caramel was its own saga, as the caramel must be maintained within a narrow temperature range to be in a liquid state - but not too hot as to further caramelize it into bitter oblivion, yet not too cold as to become too thick to assemble the puffs. Caramel that prematurely hardens during assembly is irreparable.
Without a mold or cone-shaped guide, one could use a bowl…but I chose to free-form the tower, resulting in a bit of a leaning tower that was far removed from precise puff stacking. Fighting the caramel and timing the hardening the caramel, I really wished I had an extra set of hands to manage the construction, but I had just enough puffs to complete the tower before de-constructing it by way of cutting off sections with my family and dipping the tiny puffs in extra pastry cream I had on hand.
Happy New Year to you and yours!
