Croquembouche

During the school holidays the children decided they would like to have a cooking day with friends. We decided to take on the Croquembouche! This is a French dessert made by stacking cream puffs or profiteroles into a cone and cementing them together with toffee. There is a lot of work in this dessert but it looked pretty impressive at the end and tasted great.
We followed the masterchef recipe found at http://www.masterchef.com.au/croquembouche.htm
There are about 36 eggs in this recipe so it is not for the faint hearted!
The first step is to make the cream puffs which involves making a choux pastry and pastry cream to fill them with. To make the choux pastry (a light pastry dough) involves a lot of hand mixing followed by mixer beating and the first lot we tried to pipe onto the tray the mixture wasn't thick enough so formed a flat blob. We beat the mixture further and the next lot were perfect. The pastry cream is a lovely thick custard that needs to cooled fully before using so I suggest you make before baking the choux pastry.
Once the choux pastry has cooked and cooled you fill with the pastry cream. You then dip one side in toffee, taking care not to burn yourself. Once the toffee has set you dip the other side in toffee and start stacking the profiteroles  inside a cone. I bought a metal cone from a cake supplier and there were various sizes available. It is important to oil the inside of the cone well to prevent the finished dessert from sticking when you turn it out. There were cheers of delight when the Croquembouche slid easily out of the cone and didn't fall apart. To decorate the Croquembouche you hold two forks back to back, dip the ends in the toffee and swirl them around the dessert. We were all very pleased with the end result and are looking forward to the next holiday cooking day.