The Mighty Bouche

 The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a pièce montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.  

Remember when I signed up for that daring baker thing?  Well the first challenge handed to me was to make a croquembouche.  But here's the thing: I do not like croquembouche.

Now what, you ask, is a croquembouche?  It's a type of classic French wedding dessert, though nothing at all like a cake.  In essence, it is a conical tower of profiteroles (cream puffs) held together with caramelised sugar.  Then it gets decorated with all sorts of things, usually including spun sugar.

The construction is a bit tedious, but is able to split into different components: pate a choux, pronounced "patty chokes*", which is the "batter" used to make the cream puffs; pastry cream, the filling; and the final caramel, which must be made immediately before assembly (although...  I suppose you could make it ahead, let it solidify, and carefully melt it back down.  But I digress).

I've made one before, with my school partner Shane.  Here is a picture of us in mid-build:
 
That croaky-ma-boosh took us four hours, start to finish, using some thousands** of profiteroles and gallons** of caramel and cream filling.

So wait, now I'm supposed to make one BY MYSELF, ON MY OWN FREE TIME??  Ridiculous.  The mere mention of this sent a wave of wanton rebellion through my mind.  Ever the maverick, I quickly ran through a number of ideas that, while still following the challenge rules, would give me a good outlet for creative steam.  A model of Stonehenge?  Possibly a Croquembouche version of the NCC-1701-D?

Wait a second, hold up.  Remember this: I am not a croquembouche fan.  Do I really want to put forth a good deal of effort on this thing?  No.  Not really.  My final croaked bush ended up using eclairs instead of profiteroles (the challenge didn't specify shape!!!  it only said use pate a choux filled with pastry cream!!  i think i'm safe!!).  The idea was to build a Jenga tower out of eclairs.

The problem with eclairs is that they are soft and roundy, rather than firm and squared off like Jenga blocks.  And so, even with the hardening caramel holding the pieces together, it didn't get very tall before threatening to topple.  I tried to get some good strands of spun caramel around it, but the tower just wasn't cooperating.  Whipped out the camera, took a picture, knocked it down, stuck it all in the fridge.  There's still some in there.  Whatevs.  On to the next challenge!

Oh, you can check out other entries here.






*not really.  come now.
**quantities approximated