Croquembouche or two days to suffer

A Croquembouche is a French dessert that often served at weddings. It is a high cone of profiteroles bound with caramel, and usually decorated with threads of caramel, sugared almonds, chocolate, flowers, or ribbons.

The name comes from the French words 'Croque en bouche' meaning 'crunch in the mouth'.


This week we were so lucky to make this "lovely" cake :-) !
We made it two days, I mean two practical sessions.
I have to say that this is very complicate composition, but for experienced chef it should take a hour to make such a cake.
As our chef says: "You just should find a monkey to buy it from you! :-) "



Now I'll explain how we made it!
That cone of profiteroles is placed on nougat base that made of almonds mixed with hot caramel and then rolled to desirable shape while it's still hot, because when it become cold it like a rock.

This is a base

A little triangles are made also of nougat and then rolled. Since we are not so experienced chefs, we had to warm this almond mix again and again in order to roll these shapes and cut.

This little thing will be placed on the top of the cake.

When I finished to pipe on it ( white glaze) It just slept out of my hands and cracked, since it's very fragile :-)
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Hundreds of profiteroles were baked , filled with pastry cream and glazed with caramel and some of them with nibbed sugar (kind of sugar used usually for decoration, it doesn't melt) and build around the cone as you can see below:

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And here the moment of ultimate truth came, I was supposed to take the profiteroles construction off from the cone mould, and all of them fall apart :-(. Chef said that it happens sometimes :-)

All those pictures are from the chef's demo, because my cake didn't survive!

This cake (when it peacefully delivered to the wedding :-) ) should be served by parts of profiteroles ( 5-6 per person) accompanied with ice cream or sauce.

If some of you will need a wedding cake, you know where to order it, but the price will be very high :-) !!!