Makes: 80-100 profiteroles, serves 15 – 30 people

Time required: 3 hours for the choux pastry, another 2 hours for filling and assembly

Difficulty: ★★★★☆ … Moderate to Difficult. Each step is relatively simple, however it takes time and patience to bring the whole thing together

Challenge:

After baking four cakes for Christmas dinner last year, I needed to bake something bigger and better for Christmas this year. However, an added challenge this year is that I am now living in Hong Kong and will only have one day to bake Christmas dessert once I arrive back home in Melbourne on Christmas Eve. This means I need something that can be baked in less than one day, can feed a family of 9 and also satisfies the requests I usually get from family: coffee, coconut, sweet, not too sweet … and of course it needs to have a touch of Christmas.

Enter croquembouche: makes ~80-100 profiteroles and can feed 15-30 people, it can be decorated to resemble a Christmas tree and you can make a range of fillings to meet every request … AND they look SPECTACULAR.

Inspiration:

I first saw croquembouche as an Adriano Zumbo challenge on Masterchef Australia several years ago. Touted as a very difficult challenge on Masterchef, I never even thought about making a croquembouche until several weeks ago when I was desperately thinking up Christmas ideas.

Having never baked profiteroles before, I read several blogs, watched a range of youtube videos and viewed countless Instagram photos in search of inspiration for decorating to make it fit the Christmas theme.

I decided to use my eclair recipe for the choux pastry. As for decorating, I went for a ‘cleaner’ croquembouche without the caramel strings and added pops of texture by coating some profiteroles in coconut or crushed peanuts. I also found some lovely ribbon at the Eslite Bookstore in Hong Kong to top off the croquembouche.

This post details my ‘practice’ croquembouche … I will be making the real one on Christmas Eve and will upload an update post-Christmas 🙂

Ingredients:

Choux Pastry (makes ~100 profiteroles):

• 310g bread flour, sifted
• 250ml water
• 250ml milk
• 250g butter
• 30g caster sugar
• 8-10 eggs
• 2tsp salt

Custard filling:

• 950ml milk
• 8 egg yolks
• 120g caster sugar
• 80g corn starch
• 30g unsalted butter
• 2tsp vanilla bean paste

For decorating:

• 500g sugar to assemble the croquembouche
• 200g crushed peanuts
• 100g shredded coconut

Note: you could also use sugar crystals, pearls or anything else you would like to decorate the individual profiteroles

Instructions:

Choux pastry:

1. Preheat oven to 200°C
2. Place the water, milk, butter, sugar and salt into a saucepan over low heat
3. Once the mixture just comes to a boil, take off the heat, pour in all the flour and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon (it should now look like mashed potato)
4. Place the mixture back on low heat and continue to mix for another 2-3mins until the dough forms a ball and comes away from the sides of the pan
5. Pour the dough into a bowl and mix with wooden spoon to cool slightly before adding the eggs
6. Add the eggs one at a time and ensure each egg is well incorporated before adding the next egg. This allows greater control over the amount of egg to ensure the mixture doesn’t become too runny from too much egg
7. The mixture is ready when you lift the wooden spoon and the dough slowly falls off the spoon
8. Place dough into a piping bag fitted with a 1cm plain round nozzle and pipe balls around 2-2.5cm in diameter
9. Dip a fork into water and slightly flatten the piped circles. The fork indents also reduce cracking in the oven
10. Bake for 10mins at 200°C and then reduce the temperature to 180°C and bake for another 20mins

Custard filling:

1. Whisk together egg yolks and sugar until pale
2. Add in the cornstarch and whisk
3. Place milk over low-med heat until it comes to a light boil
4. Remove milk from heat and pour 1/3 of the milk into the egg mixture while continually whisking
5. Pour the egg mixture into the remaining 2/3 of the milk and place back on low heat. Continue to whisk until the custard thickens
6. Stir in butter and vanilla
7. Transfer this to a bowl to cool – at this stage you could also break the custard into smaller batches and create several flavours by whisking in melted dark chocolate, fruit puree or coffee syrup
8. Cover in glad wrap (with the glad wrap touching the surface of the custard) and refrigerate until it’s time to assemble the croquembouche.

Assembling the croquembouche:

1. Transfer the custard into a piping bag fitted with a long piping tip and fill each profiterole with custard. Be sure to poke the piping tip through the side of the profiterole which will be facing the inside of the croquembouche
2. Melt sugar over low heat until all the sugar is melted and is a light amber colour (you could also make a sugar syrup by adding water). Carefully dip the bottom of each profiterole and place the toffee side up on the tray to dry – at this stage I also coated around half of the profiteroles with either shredded coconut or crushed peanuts
3.  Trace a circle template on a sheet of baking paper
4. Construct the croquembouche by carefully lining the profiteroles around the circle; sticking each profiterole together using the toffee ‘glue’

Tips for serving:

• The profiteroles can be cut away from the tower using a pair of scissors
• I also pulled together a bowl of dark chocolate ganache (150g dark chocolate, 100ml cream) for guests to dip the profiteroles into while serving

 

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