It seems I’ve gotten myself caught in quite the cycle of one-upsmanship. Most remarkably, it’s with myself. It began with the three-dimensional duck cake fir a coworker’s birthday and escalated from there. After making a three-dimensional duck, it became a bit of a challenge to determine how to recognize another coworker’s thirtieth birthday appropriately. After all, it’s a major milestone, but a simple cake would pale compared to a three-dimensional one. I finally settle on a flourless chocolate cake topped with a Bailey’s chocolate ganache and homemade strawberry sorbet and Nutella ice cream to accompany it. Mission accomplished.
So with another coworker turning 34 on Bastille Day, I was now facing the same self-inflicted challenge: how would I recognize this milestone while remembering that this particular coworker – while a tremendous fan of food – has no great affinity for most birthday cakes. I considered making the Rebar carrot cake, but couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the project. After taking some time to mull it over, I settled on croquembouche. For those unfamiliar with it, croquembouche is simply a mountain of cream puffs. This, I reasoned, would not only serve as a suitable challenge for my own abilities (given that I had only made cream puffs once with a friend, under the expert eyes of Lora Lonnesbery at Creating Occasions and had never made the pastry cream that the puffs would be filled with), but would be an impressive feat and would appropriately recognize the birthday boy’s French blood and the French holiday with which he shared the day.
I will not share the recipes here, as they came from Lora. There’s lots of recipes for both choux and pastry cream available. If you’re interested in Lora’s own recipes and learning from her years of experience at the Fairmont Empress, I would encourage you to get in touch with her directly and to enroll in her choux class. It was certainly money well spent.
I made the pastry cream Monday night and then made the choux, baked the cream puffs, filled them with Lora’s vanilla pastry cream and made a quick chocolate sauce which I dipped the puffs in in order to hold the cream puffs together in their tower. As for the results, I think the photo accompanying this post will serve as evidence enough of success. The croquembouche was undoubtedly a visual and gastronomic success, impressive to both the eye and the palate.
I chose to simply stack the puffs rather than use a styrofoam or paper cone as recommended by some bakers. The result was imperfect in its structure, but fun to put together. While time-consuming, each step in the process was rather easy and the only equipment required was a heavy-bottomed sauce pan to cook of the choux and the paste cream and a pastry bag with two tips, a large to form the cream puffs and a small for filling the baked puffs with cream.
After a bit of time, the cream puffs became uniform and stopped looking as if they had cancerous growths on the side (though the misshaped puffs seemed to go unnoticed by my grateful coworkers). I am entirely confident there will be more croquembouches in my future and hope to experiment with bacon and espresso-flavored pastry creams next time around.
Now the only question is what to do for the next birthday.
