Croquembouche

What is a croquembouche you ask? If the French could ever conceive an ornate and unnecessarily complicated pièce montèe, this would be it. Apparently this monstrosity was created by Antoine Careme in the late 1700's. The name comes from the French words 'Croque en bouche' meaning 'crunch in the mouth'. If you ask me, it should be called pain on the fingers, since so many people burned themselves dipping and assembling the cream puffs with molten sugar. It makes for pretty cream puffs though, and I was lucky enough to not maim myself.




We started by making the decorative pieces made out of nougatine, which is almonds mixed with hot sugar. The pieces were cut out and molded. I have this general fear of hot sugar. In a way it's like dealing with hot oil; it can take your skin off if you're not careful. Once the pieces were assembled with sugar, we decorated them with royal icing.





Here is a picture of my completed croquembouche. Each of the cream puffs was painstakingly dipped into sugar, left to harden, and then assembled onto the nougatine base. We didn't fill our cream puffs with pastry cream; this was just an exercise on croquembouche assembly...since we all know we're going to be making this again at home at our leisure. Haha. Mine is a bit bloated, since I forgot to start moving up in a conical fashion until it was too late.



All the pretty croquembouches in a row: