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”.

\

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

Click here to read the full story

I wrote before about how difficult it was for Mr NQN and I to say “I Love You” to each other. That reminded me of a situation from back when I worked in an office. We were a typical “Office Space” company, a technology start up where very few had offices with walls and we’d find ourselves staring at neutral coloured woolly material covered partitions all day. Of course with partitions, we would hear everything that others around us were saying. Every morning I’d hear one of my buyer’s pre work rituals: checking out the scores for Arsenal and browsing various adult entertainment websites (yes really).

Click here to read the full story

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was exciting. For not only was it chocolate based, it only had 3 ingredients. Yes seriously. Of course I’m not counting the ice cream part. They wouldn’t let us get away with something so simple. But even give this head start of sorts, I still waited til the last week to do this. I’m not usually a procrastinator, indeed I prefer to get things done earlier than waiting and dreading for something. Call me a Peeling-Off-The-Bandaid-Quickly kind of person. I was the one that handed in University papers early (although conversely I sometimes show up 5-10 minutes late to things). It’s probably because I like planning, in fact my husband told me that I was recently talking in my sleep where I impatiently issued him instructions on how to organise and move plants. Yes that’s what my dreams are made of. Hardly hot stuff wouldn’t you say?

But I digress, the cake itself is incredibly moist – most flourless cakes are, but this one contains no almond meal as well as no flour. So the look suffers a little in that is sinks and forms a crater. And for someone that loves the look of a cake as much as the taste, this dismayed me a little. I paced around the house clucking like an anxious Type A personality chicken. What do I do? The plans I had to decorate it were awry. It was too sunken. Then I flicked through Gordon Ramsay’s 3 Star Chef cookbook and combined two decorative touches I saw on the pages. **Sigh** “No Chicken Little,” I said to myself, “The Sky is not falling”.

I’d like to tell you that I reduced some plum juice to a syrup but I took the lazy option and used jam mixed with water to create the pools which gave me a good flavour, without little effort. The biscuits on top I bought from Aldi, which I buy every year for Valentines Day. I did mention that we had to make an ice cream to go along with it, and I had originally intended for an Apricot sorbet (it would have matched the decorations I had in mine before I realised that it was a sunken cake) but instead I used a Cafe Au Lait Ice Cream I had made previously. And whilst it didn’t turn out as I’d originally hoped, the proof as they say is in the tasting. It is a wonderfully gooey cake, like a gorgeous soft nut free brownie.

As for my plans, we’re off to New Zealand’s South Island for our 3rd Wedding Anniversary. I shall of course have internet access and I look forward to reporting back on all that is wonderful, good and foody in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

To see other Daring Baker’s creations, click here

Click here to read the full story