Tradish

Ah the croquenbouche, the traditional French wedding cake. For as fussy as they are, their wedding cakes aren't near as fussy as North American ones. This little tasty may look familiar, we seem to make pate a choux every 5 minutes and fill it with various creams, dip it in caramel, then assemble it in different ways. So this is another one, but bigger and fancier.

The chef said the rule was that we had to have 50 choux balls on our cake. But we could also fill the cone with choux balls if we had them and didn't want to stick them on the cake. The point is to have 3-4 balls per serving (small wedding). So I made the calculated decision to make a much smaller cone, fill it with choux, and then it would fit in my fridge and I wouldn't look like an idiot carrying it home. What does the chef say to me during my evaluation? "It's small." Yes. I know. I did that on purpose. But my choux were so small and perfect who could really complain? So these are filled with good ol standby pastry cream, then coated in caramel, then stuck together with same caramel onto a nougatine base (think sesame snaps but with almonds....definitely the most delicious part of the cake) and to each other. The sticky outy things are nougatine "dents de loup" which means wolf's teeth, a name the french apply to all things with any kind of a point.

The chef also took great joy in waiting for us to burn ourselves on the 180-degree Celsius sugar as we dipped. Did I? You bet. Did I give him the pleasure of even watching me flinch? Hells no. I can take a burn, grit my teeth and assemble choux balls like a man. I only got one tiny burn on my fingertip. I've definitely suffered worse in cuisine grabbing the handle of a pot that was in the oven.

So these closeups show my ingenius caramel decoration. I just drizzled leftover caramel on parch and let it cool. Fine. It's not my best work, but in a pinch, it worked. It wrapped around and looked cool. I had a big Dr. Seussian caramel thingamajig to stick in the top that was twice the height of the cake and it cracked us all up, but I didn't present it with that because the Chef didn't know who Dr. Seuss was, so the humour was lost on him. He kept asking me who Dr. Yes was.