Sunday, January 3, 2010

Battle Orange and the Life of a Croquembouche




Last night, I attended an Iron Chef (tm) gathering where the secret ingredient was oranges. I started searching tastespotting's nifty feature for searching tags and came across zested's chocolate orange croquembouche and I knew we had a winner. I really wanted one of these for my wedding cake, but I was afraid we'd all die of food poisoning in the 100-degree heat with all the custard insides.

Was it ridiculous to construct? Yes. Messy? I'm still cleaning sugar off my back porch. Fun? Oh, heck yes.



zested's directions are great and easy to follow. They chose to adhere the croquembouche together with chocolate, while I went with caramel... and then we had a hell of a time making it come apart. A quick search reveals that traditionally couples must break their croquembouche with a champagne bottle, which definitely would have come in handy last night. Instead we used a fork, a knife and some arm power to dismantle the thing.



I would highly recommend trying to make cream puffs at least once - it's barely harder than making cookies and so much fun!

As for spun sugar, this quick tutorial helped me make quick use of the leftover caramel post-construction.

Any ideas on removing hardened sugar from a cement porch?

love,
lunettes

4 comments:

The Fight Of My Life said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Grammy's Here said...

Beautiful! Splendid job.

Anonymous said...

Nicely done - I tried spun sugar first but it wasn't nearly as nice as yours. I was also scraping up sugar strands for days. I suggest dousing the remnants with boiling water - they'll melt right away.

Mauricio said...

I like your blog ...
Regards!!!