

Dear Reader, no doubt at one stage or another, you may have been asked to make a birthday or wedding cake for a friend or family member. I did one a few years ago for Mr NQN’s sister. I swore I would never do another such was the stress. The bride and groom wanted cream cheese frosting on a wedding that was held in the blistering 40+C heat of January in a room without air conditioning. I had panic filled nightmares of it dripping and melting and trying to pass that off as a deliberate effect.

Vincent Gadan
But then my friend The Second Wife asked me to make her wedding cake. The reason why I happily said yes was because she said “I would love absolutely anything you come up with. It can be Halloween themed. It can be made of anything. It can be a batshit crazy as you like!!! “. It was a brief I could hardly refuse! I wanted it to be brilliant (and despite the fact that she had mentioned Halloween, it wasn’t going to be Halloween themed). So when I was offered a place of any of Patisse’s cooking classes I jumped at the French Croquembouche one thinking that I would be able to test out whether I could make one for her wedding or not. I had made choux quite a bit as I am a bit of a choux addict in le Religieuse, St Honore, Croqumebouche cupcakes, and a small croquembouche.

I walk into the Waterloo location at 5.45pm for the 6-10pm class where there are eight other people gathered. Jennifer from Patisse explains how the class will progress. Chef Vincent Gadan is teaching us tonight and he comes out with a flourish and explains the croquembouche to us. Mr NQN was coming along to photograph it but little did he know that I was going to get him to try his hand at making the croquembouche!
Vincent points out that there are two men in the class and we later learn that one was given the gift from his girlfriend who suggested that it would be more entertaining to watch him in the class than to go out for drinks with her friends. The second guy is there with his girlfriend and up until he walked in, it was surprise that she had arranged-he thought that he was going to a taping of “The Footy Show” or a sports game!

Decorations we can choose from
Vincent brings us the croquembouche we will be making. It has about 50-60 choux balls on it and is about 30 cms / 1 foot high. He also shows us the decorations that we can choose from. There are fresh flowers, tiny choux balls covered with cocoa nibs, crystallised violet, chopped pistachios, pearl sugar and egg shaped silver dragees. I ask if Mr NQN and I can combine our choux balls and make one double that size as I want to test whether I can do a wedding sized croquembouche. They say yes!


The consistency of the choux pastry
We wash our hands and take our places at the bench. In front of us are the ingredients that have been measured out for us. We start with making the choux pastry. He shows us the approximate size of the buns that we need to make which is about an inch in diameter as they will expand slightly. The dough is straightforward, mixing the flour with the milk, water, sugar and salt that has been heated until boiling and we just cook this mixture and taking the steam out of it while stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon for 1 minute. Interestingly, Vincent gives us the measurement of 5 grams of caster sugar as “six pinches”.
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That’s a dough hook (left) and a paddle (right)

Adding eggs gradually
“Dessecher” is the process of taking steam out of it. We then place it in a mixing bowl fixed with a paddle to remove even more steam. The whole eggs are then added to the mixture. This mixture then has to be placed in the fridge for 1-2 hours or overnight until it firms up as you cannot pipe it as it is as the texture is too soft. Never fear, he has made a batch of choux pastry at 5pm that day so that we have some ready for us.

Consistency of the choux batter once the steam is released, ready for refrigeration
















