Le Croquembouche
Christmas is a mere WEEK away (gasp!) and I am still caught in a whirlwind of recipe brainstorms. I think, maybe an array of German butter cookies? Maybe a traditional Buche de Noel? Maybe just some apéritif biscotti? My mind is juggling and weighing the pros and cons of a million recipes and as J.D. Salinger once wrote, "I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight."
With the chaos of Christmas dessert planning (yes I know how melodramatic I'm being, it's part of my aesthetic ok?), I find myself longing for the nostalgia of Thanksgiving when I absolutely massacred the dessert game with a creative spin on the traditional French wedding cake known as the Croquembouche. The "cake" is actually made up of a tower of cream puffs built by cementing them together with hot caramel. Each puff (or, Pâte à Choux) is dipped in the freshly made, hot caramel then hardens in place on the tower. As the caramel begins to cool and harden, the towermeister dips a spoon into the caramel and begins swirling it around the tower, creating a hair-thin, weblike cucoon of spun sugar. All in all it is absolutely magnificent to create, to see, and to eat.
Croquembouche literally translates to "crunch in mouth," for the sensation of biting into one of the caramel-coated puff pastries. The experience is hard to describe, but it's something along the lines of that commercial where someone bites into a York Peppermint Patty and their pupils dilate and a flower blooms really rapidly, etc.
I created a tower of about 75 pâte à choux, but decided to create three different variations to keep things lively. The first was a traditional cream puff with the standard (mind you, delicious) filling, sprinkled generously with powdered sugar. The second was a dark chocolate-dipped variation with a Cointreau and vanilla-infused whipped cream. Lastly, I filled a plain puff dipped in extra caramel with fresh raspberries and clover honeyed whipped cream. The result was sensational in the literal, sensory meaning of the word.
The recipe is based on those for traditional pâte à choux and whipped cream, with some flavor variations and in-the-moment improv's. In toto, a massively fun experience.
Some of the best moments of the Thanksgiving holiday were watching guests precariously eyeing the tower, wondering how to break into it, having horrible Jenga flashbacks from their youth, and hesitantly prodding at it delicately, trying to both break through the caramel cage and at the same time trying not to disturb the structure.
By the end of the night, all 75 cream puffs were either carried off by alien spaceships or eaten by the 20 guests. If it really was the second, then much respect to my feasting friends for their ability to eat so many cream puffs. That's not an easy feat.
I'm still sitting on a stack of Christmas ideas, but for now let's all just bask once more in the glory of the Croquembouche. Vive le Croquembouche!
Check out some of my favorite croquembouche inspirations below, and check out my Instagram and Pinterest pages for more recipes and inspiration!
