Inspiration: The Classic French Croquembouche

Creation: A Curlified Croquembouche Chocolate Cake

Chocolate Cake = good. Cream Puffs = heaven. Cream Puffs heaped on a chocolate cake and held together by spun sugar = help me God. As in Diyos ko, parang awa mo, help me stop eating the things before they get on the cake in the first place!

The first time I attempted to make cream puffs was when I was around 12 years old, with one of the pioneering craftsters in my life, my Manang Malutz. She convinced me to help her make cream puffs and éclairs one afternoon, and I don’t have good memories of that day because a) our oven had a mind of its own and you could never really count on it maintaining the same temp for extended periods of time and b) it was on a sweltering, hot afternoon in the dregs of the province where the heat wraps itself around you and never lets go.

Those cream puffs weren’t exactly memorable, and when my interest in baking was revived as I grew up, I often dreamed of making cream puffs again from scratch. Proper cream puffs too – with a crispy shell and rich custard cream inside. I would look at pictures of the French Croquembouche, a tower of cream puffs that’s sometimes served at weddings (an example of which you see above) and vowed to myself that I would make them again some day. (I found out the “croquembouche” is a French phrase that means “crunch in the mouth”.)

I finally had the chance to make this for a friend’s birthday about three weeks ago. I wanted to make cream puffs and somehow make a birthday cake out of it as well. The first time those cream puffs came out of the oven, I was amazed at how…cream-puff-sy they looked! I almost couldn’t believe I made them myself. I had to urge to call my grandmother in Bacolod to tell her all about it, except that Lola doesn’t remember me anymore and would probably be like “Cream puffs, ano kuno?!?”. But I do think, anyhow, that Lola is always guiding my hand when I bake, especially when I had to patiently fill each of those puffs with custard through a piping bag!

And, it was my very first attempt at spun sugar, which I never thought I could do. Lola surely was the quiet voice in my head telling me to be delicate but purposeful in caramelizing sugar, drizzling it over the puffs, and using the tines of a fork to quickly coax the hardening syrup into cobwebbed strings of pure sugar.

Cream puffs are French in origin and date back to when Catherine de Medici brought her Italian chefs to France upon her wedding to King Henry II. The chef credited for the creation of the dessert was her chef Pantarelli. Sometimes called profiteroles, they’re made using choux pastry dough — a fancy word for the simple combination of butter, flour and eggs that’s cooked over a stovetop and later portioned out to be baked in an oven. It rises because of a high moisture content that steams the dough as it bakes. The result is a hollowed-out, puffed pastry with nooks and crannies waiting to be filled with sweet cream.

Here are some images of the odyssey I took to finally making cream puffs again.

Whew! It was all worth it, though, for the chance to say I finally did it all on my own!

At least I wasn’t as crazy as this guy, Ukranian chef Vaneltyn Shtefano, who made a wedding dress for his bride out of 20 pounds worth of cream puffs! (The poor woman.)