Croquembouche

Croquembouche – recipe with photo, French cuisine
Rating: 4.6 Votes: 43
Cooking Time:
2 hours
Recipe Yield:
1.5 kg
Difficulty:
Medium recipe

Croquembouche is a recipe for a French dessert, which is assembled in the form of a cone from profiteroles with filling and sealed caramel or sweet sauce. Croquembouche is decorated with caramel threads, candied flowers. Previously, such a dessert was prepared for weddings, but recently, since croquembouche looks like a Christmas tree, it is cooked for Christmas and New Year. Optionally, some profiteroles are dipped in melted chocolate or chocolate sauce.

Recipe Ingredients

For Custard Dough
Wheat Flour 200 g
Butter 100 g
Eggs 5 pcs
Water 90 ml
Milk 90 ml
Salt 1 pinch
For Cream
Sugar 275 g
Butter 320 g
Milk 185 ml
Eggs 1 pcs
Cognac 1 tbsp
For Caramel
Sugar 200 g
Water 2 tbsp
Lemon Juice 0,5 tsp

Cooking Recipe

To cook the recipe of croquembouche French cuisine, preheat the oven to 200°C (390°F) and line a baking sheet with baking paper. Pour water and milk into a saucepan, add salt, butter, room temperature, and put on fire. When the butter has melted, bring the liquid to a boil, and, stirring with a wooden spoon, add all the sifted flour.

Mix quickly, during this time the dough warms up and brews. When all products are mixed into a homogeneous mass, remove from heat. Do not keep the dough on fire for a long time, oil will begin to stand out and the dough will become liquid. If it so happened that the dough was overexposed on fire, you can add a small amount of flour, but this will not be quite custard dough and may affect the quality of baking.

Add an egg to the cooled dough and mix with a spatula or a wooden spoon until smooth, then the next egg, and again until smooth, etc. The dough should not be too liquid, but at the same time not the same as for dumplings.

Transfer the choux pastry into a pastry bag or pastry syringe. Pour the dough on a baking sheet in small portions and put in the oven. Bake the profiteroles for 20 minutes.

Separately, prepare the cream. Mix milk, egg and sugar, put the mixture on a slow fire, bring to a boil and cook for another 2 minutes. Beat softened butter with vanilla sugar until white. Continuing to beat, gradually introduce the syrup. The cream should turn out airy, add cognac to the whipped cream and mix. Using a pastry syringe, fill the chilled profiteroles with cream.

In a separate bowl, pour water into sugar and put on a slow fire. Bring to a boil, add lemon juice, stir, cover and place over medium heat. Boil syrup for 15-20 minutes until caramelized.

Croquembush can be made in several ways. If according to the classics, then profiteroles smeared on the sides with caramel are laid out in a circle in the form of a cone, while the middle of the cone remains hollow. The other option is a little easier. Roll a cone out of thick paper, place the sharp end in a container for stability, put profiteroles in a paper cone, periodically lubricating the layers with caramel. Let the caramel set and then turn it over onto a plate. But there is another way, to spread the profiteroles in layers, reducing to the top, so you get a solid pyramid.

Decorate the assembled pyramid of profiteroles with a net of caramel threads. To do this, dip the fork into the caramel, and then pour the grid onto the baking paper. Peel off the caramel mesh from the paper and overlay it on croquembouche. Harvest the croquembush and garnish with the caramel just before serving, otherwise the caramel may run off.