I’m happy that my first attempt at choux pastry and a croquembouche worked but I’m a bit disappointed with its appearance. Although the taste definitely makes up for its bad looks. Croquembouche apparently means crunch in the mouth. The outside was nice and crunchy and the inside was soft and smooth chocolate deliciousness. Mmmmm
I decided to make a chocolate crème patissiere which is just a custard to go inside the lil babies so I made this the day before since it needs time (6 hours or overnight) in the fridge. This was delicious.
I read and re-read the recipe, read all the daring baker’s tips, watched Martha Stewart’s online video twice as well as some other random guy on you tube and was ready to make choux pastry. I was even a bit giggly with excitement and even dancing around the kitchen didn’t calm my nerves but it did make the whole experience so much more fun.
The choux pastry was pretty easy, as was piping the mixture, although I think mine were a bit too big. I used a spiral piping technique but next time I think I’ll try a different piping technique. Waiting for them to puff up whilst in the oven was similar to waiting for my macaron’s to grow feet. I was very anxious but then super excited when my kitchen timer beeped to announce they were ready and I saw they were puffed, golden and firm.
The next step was to fill each puff with the chocolate custard. Martha Stewart used a squeeze bottle, shown above. So I bought some bottles and filled one up and it made a nice insertion into the bottom of the puffs but the top of the bottle kept coming off the bottle, almost dropping custard everywhere. This happened a few times. So I had to make a quick change and use a piping bag. I got a new piping bag last year when I was making macaron’s but the smaller tips didn’t fit that snug in the bag and I didn’t want to cut the tip off the bag so I used the piping bag I inherited from mum. I filled the bag but it only came with one sized tip and it made massive holes in the puffs and cracked them. Very disappointing but nothing hard caramel can’t fix. The piping bag also had a rip in the side which I only discovered after I had filled it with custard so I had to patch it up with sticky tape which I thought was very MacGyver of me.
The caramel was easy to make but the recipe said to stick the saucepan in an ice bath to stop it from cooking after it was melted. This made the caramel turn into hard toffee very quickly before I could dip each puff in it. Luckily you can just heat it back up and it melts again. I was worried it might burn but no sign or smell of anything burning so it was all good.
This is a picture taken about halfway through making the croquembouche. Martha Stewart’s method is to dip the top of each puff in caramel first and then dip a side into the caramel and stick it to another puff, building it up. It’s a shame I piped the puffs too big so didn’t have as many as I would have liked which meant the base layer of puffs wasn’t as large as I would have liked.
This was the daring baker’s May challenge but with a very busy term with exams, marking and reports I didn’t even realise it was the challenge until after everyone had posted their beautiful masterpieces. So glad I’m on school holidays now and have the time to cook and bake.
Apparently they don’t keep well but there was heaps leftover from our dinner party last night so I better go test that theory.
For the recipe see here.
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