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.)

I love this cartoon! And it has nothing to do at all with this post, but it’s so darn funny I decided to include it anyway.

I’ve decided that the GWAC blog is going to host something called the “I/C Project Series.”

I/C stands for Inspiration/Creation.

I often find that the memory of a good meal, a photo, a person or an interesting piece of artwork sets me off on a crazy, crafty, cook-y ride. I have fun translating those into my crafts and baking, by taking a flavor, a color, a smell–any aspect of the original piece that appeals to me–and reworking it into a project. The end result is something handcrafted that (hopefully) celebrates some elements of the original piece, but now with a curly twist!

I’ve shortened the words “inspiration” and “creation” to “I/C” as a pun for “I see” (yay, puns!), and also because they were too long and sounded a bit Hallmark-y in the first place. Tee hee.

I hope to encourage the craftster in you to take in and appreciate those details in your everyday life that have the potential to take you on a creative journey. There’s so much you can draw from—your own history, the travels you take, even your daily routine.

Let’s get started with my first I/C project, a croquembouche-inspired chocolate cake, pictures of which you’ll see above.

I hope you set off on your own I/C ideas too!

I’m a frustrated dressmaker, and I say this because the most complicated things I can sew well are drawstring jammies or skirts. Sewing zippers terrifies and fascinates me at the same time, and it’s this kind of interest in clothes construction that makes me ferret out designers and costumers, if only to look at their pieces and marvel at how talented they are.

I’ve been stalking Jaqueline Durran online ever since I saw the green dress she designed for Keira Knightley’s character Cecilia Tallis from the movie Atonement.

It appears in the movie only about a fourth of the film’s running time, but it’s the one thing I remember visually. Granted, a LOT happens to Cecilia in this dress (watch the movie!), but I think it’s more because of how rich that green is.

Green is my favorite color and before the dress above, my favorite green movie outfit was this one, worn by Estella in the fountain scene of Cuaron’s Great Expectations:

But just look at how stunning THIS dress is:

Ah, lovely. If you look closely, there’s delicate cutwork on her neckline and all that graceful drapery around her hips.

What’s even more fascinating is the story of how Jaqueline Durran, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the costumes in this film, found the perfect shade of green. After poring through all the green silk and organza in London, she zeroed in on three choices: a lime-green silk, a black and green organza and another type of green chiffon. A master dyer studied the swatches and special-dyed 100 yards of plain white fabric into the combination of all those hues.

And no wonder I was drawn to Durran’s costumes. She also designed those in another film I love, Pride & Prejudice:

And she assisted my costume hero, Trisha Biggar, for Star Wars Episode II:

In a parallel universe, I’m a costume designer who has yards of special fabric at her disposal and can pleat and smock and construct corsets with my eyes closed.

In this lifetime, though, I still can’t do a decent zipper! Tutorials for cookies, anyone?

I don’t know why I alliterate so much. I just noticed how much of it I do on this blog. How strange. At least it’s better than rhyming, that’s what I say.

Anyhow, Toni of Wifely Steps tagged me with the 123 Book Tag.

Rules:
1) Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages.

2) Open the book to page 123.

3) Find the fifth sentence.

4) Post the next three sentences.

5) Tag five people. (Do I even KNOW five people with blogs?)

Sadly, I don’t have some groundbreaking piece of literature to wow you with. I don’t even have a cookbook nearby! The nearest grab-able book I have is this:

The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers (14th Edition)

Not as exciting as Toni’s The Other Boleyn Girl! I use this for work but have a copy at home. I know it sounds horribly academic, but it’s actually an invaluable resource for anyone who writes, copy edits and proofreads. A tome for nerds.

Here are the sentences from page 123, following the rules of the tag:

“Blueprints (“blues”), vandykes (brown prints), and silver prints are all different forms of photographic prints made from the negatives that are to be used in offset printing. They do not show the quality of image to be attained in the final printing, but they provide a means of checking the accuracy of the contents. As with repro, the editor should check to see that all parts are in place and all previous corrections have been made.”

Zzzz. Maybe I should have picked the second closest book, Sex And The Single Witch (!), given to me by my friend Kim, who is a witch in her own way. Haha.

I’m tagging: Via (You haven’t blogged in a while!), Mitzi (Ikaw din.), Jen (What are we doing for your birthday?), Jazz (Since you probably have all those feminist books on your nightstand.) and Vicky (Bakit hindi tayo nagkita nung Christmas ha?).

These beauties from SusieCakes in Brentwood , CA found their way to the conference room at work today. They were to celebrate the launch of a new project.

I looked at them with longing. Not because I wanted to eat them (well, maybe), but because I wanted to make them! They were so pretty to look at and made me dream about decorating my days away, boxing up cakes and sealing them with The Girl With A Curl labels.

But I do have to say that refrigerated cakes need to sit in room temperature for awhile. I hate biting into hardened buttercream. Frosting like that ought to be enjoyed in all its gooey (but not runny) glory.

This weekend is going to be busy, baking-wise. I’ll hopefully have something to show for it on Monday!

Have a sweet weekend, all.

So, GWAC is at its new address. I’m still getting used to being here, so if you see bugs and stuff, think back to the day you first handled yarn and a crochet hook. Unless your first name is Martha and your last is Stewart, I don’t think crochet came that easily (well, now, maybe Martha didn’t sail through it at first either!) I was getting a wee bit frustrated at learning all the ins and outs of Wordpress because I wanted to get things up and running all in one night. But I realized that getting accustomed to this odd language is really like learning a new craft. Patience, patience, patience. If I can devote six hours to baking and decorating a cake, I can do this!

I’m operating on a bare-bones template for now, but there’s newer, curlier stuff to come!

Thank you again to Noel for the heavy lifting and for convincing me to migrate over.

And thanks to you for following me to my new home.

And thanks to the month of April, for coming just in time.