choux Archives - Passionate About Baking

“The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us….”

Marcel Proust

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

This month’s challenge recipe is for a Piece Montée, which means literally “mounted piece”, also known by another name – Croquembouche, or literally, “crunch in the mouth”. The piece montée is the traditional wedding cake in France, and are often served at baptisms and communions as well. The classic piece montée is a high pyramid/cone made of profiteroles {cream-filled puff pastries} sometimes dipped in chocolate, bound with caramel, and usually decorated with threads of caramel, sugared almonds, chocolate, flowers, or ribbons.

This recipe has 3 main components: the pate a choux, the crème patissiere, and the glaze used to mount/decorate it. While you can purchase or make a cardboard conical structure to build your piece montée or use toothpicks as an aid, it is relatively easy to assemble it using just the baked pate a choux as the main building blocks and the glaze as the glue. {The latter is what I did}.

Those who know me and my love for coffee would probably guess that my pastry cream had to be coffee. There was no way I was going to miss this challenge. I needed the push to make profiteroles for the second time in my life, the first being when I was in school 25 years ago. Then, it was the best thing we did in our summer vactions, and for once that memory remained alive in my mind all these years! I was SO EXCITED!!

Vanilla beans have helped rid me of any fear of eggy smells in baking, and especially in pastry creams. The coffee pastry cream was absolutely delicious. I made it the previous day, and planned to make the choux the next day. Fate had other plans for me, and I messed up on the choux whereby I added the flour in the beginning. UGH! By the time I began the recipe all over again, and the choux baked, it was almost time to get the kids home. The choux this time were trouble free and behaved most beautifully. I boxed the puffs overnight, refreshed them in a hot oven the next morning, and I was ready to roll! What a fabulous recipe! I don’t see myself using any other in the future.

Gosh, FUN was the word. I enjoyed injecting the puffs with the pastry cream. A wonderful experience to feel them fill up and become heavy in seconds. Putting together the ‘tower’ was a bit of a challenge, and pretty much breathless. With the weather HOT at 44C+ temperatures, and the pastry cream melting, the assembly was very rushed. I dunked the bottoms of the profiteroles into melted chocolate, built up my croquembouche at break-neck speed, and bunged it into the fridge. With time on hand, I did some caramel too from this link I found on Nic’s post on Cherrapeno. I have a long way to master the sugar spinning art, and would love to attempt it again soon. My curls didn’t come out as beautifully as Nic’s, but the caramel was good enough to present the customary crunch in the mouth to the Piece Montée.

This was a beautiful dessert to serve, and was highly appreciated at home. It served up luxury in every bite, and the flavours were absolutely sensational. Thank you Cat for hosting such a wonderful challenge. We LOVED it. Well picked indeed!! Thank you as always Lisa of La Mia Cucina and Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice for hosting this fab kitchen!!

CROQUEMBOUCHE
Based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri {Minimally adapted}
Ingredients:

For the Coffee Crème Patissiere
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup low fat cream
1/2 vanilla bean, scraped
2 tbsp cornstarch
6 tbsp vanilla sugar
3 small eggs
3/4 tsp instant coffee
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
Method:

Dissolve cornstarch in ¼ cup of milk. Combine the remaining milk, cream, vanilla bean and cream with the sugar in a saucepan; bring to boil. Remove from heat.

Beat the eggs into the cornstarch mixture. Pour 1/3 of boiling milk into the egg mixture, whisking constantly so that the eggs do not begin to cook.

Return the remaining milk to boil. Pour in the hot egg mixture in a stream, continuing whisking.

Continue whisking {this is important – you do not want the eggs to solidify/cook} until the cream thickens and comes to a boil. Remove from heat and beat in the butter and vanilla.

Pate a Choux

Yield: About 28
¾ cup water
6 Tbsp/85g unsalted butter
¼ Tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
Egg Wash
1 egg white

Method:

Pre-heat oven to 220C degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Combine water, butter, salt and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil and stir occasionally. At boil, remove from heat and sift in the flour, stirring to combine completely.

Return to heat and cook, stirring constantly until the batter dries slightly and begins to pull away from the sides of the pan.

Transfer to a bowl and stir with a wooden spoon 1 minute to cool slightly.

Add 1 egg. The batter will appear loose and shiny.

As you stir, the batter will become dry-looking like lightly buttered mashed potatoes.It is at this point that you will add in the next egg. Repeat until you have incorporated all the eggs.

Piping:

Transfer batter to a pastry bag fitted with a large open tip. Pipe choux about 1 inch-part in the baking sheets. Choux should be about 1 inch high about 1 inch wide.

Using a clean finger dipped in hot water, gently press down on any tips that have formed on the top of choux when piping. You want them to retain their ball shape, but be smoothly curved on top.

Brush tops with egg wash {I did an egg white wash}.

Baking:

Bake the choux at 220C until well-puffed and turning lightly golden in color, about 10 minutes.

Lower the temperature to 180C and continue baking until well-colored and dry, about 20 minutes more. Remove to a rack and cool.

{Can be stored in a airtight box overnight.}

Filling:

When you are ready to assemble your piece montée, using a plain pastry tip, pierce the bottom of each choux. Fill the choux with pastry cream using either the same tip or a star tip, and place on a paper-lined sheet. Choux can be refrigerated briefly at this point while you make your glaze.

Chocolate Glaze:

8 ounces/200 g. finely chopped chocolate (use the finest quality you can afford as the taste will be quite pronounced; I recommend semi-sweet)

Melt chocolate in microwave or double boiler. Stir at regular intervals to avoid burning. Use the best quality chocolate you can afford. Use immediately.

Assembly of your Piece Montée:

You may want to lay out your unfilled, unglazed choux in a practice design to get a feel for how to assemble the final dessert.Take some of the larger choux and assemble them in the circle for the bottom layer. Practice seeing which pieces fit together best.

Once you are ready to assemble your piece montée, dip the top of each choux in your glaze, and start assembling on your cake board/plate/sheet. Continue dipping and adding choux in levels using the glaze to hold them together as you build up.

When you have finished the design of your piece montée, you may drizzle with remaining glaze or use ribbons, sugar cookie cut-outs, almonds, flowers, etc. to decorate.

Have fun and enjoy! Bon appétit!

♥ Thank you for stopping by ♥

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Tag: choux

{Baking} CROQUEMBOUCHE with the Daring Bakers … time for ‘crunch in the mouth’!

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