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Cooking
Croquembouche
· 4 servings
Make the dough
Bring salted water to a boil in a saucepan. Add the butter and let it melt. Stirring constantly, tip in all the flour at once. Keep stirring vigorously over low heat for about 2 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and let cool slightly.
Add the eggs
Now start adding the eggs gradually, stirring constantly. A hand-held electric mixer with whisk attachments works best for this.
Pipe mounds onto the baking sheet
Spoon the dough into a piping bag and pipe walnut-sized mounds onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. If you'd rather skip washing a piping bag and all its nozzles, you can simply drop the dough onto the sheet with a teaspoon instead.
Bake
Bake for 12–15 minutes in an electric oven preheated to 200°C. Once the puffs have cooled, fill them with vanilla pudding cream (the easy option), or, if you're feeling more ambitious, make a proper crème pâtissière (egg yolk custard) – but that's a story for another time.
Make the cream
Cook the listed ingredients into a pudding, let it cool, then beat it together with the butter.
Fill the puffs
For filling the puffs, there's no getting around using a piping bag. Fill the bag with cream, poke a small hole in the base of each puff with the piping tip, and fill.
Tip: decorating
Traditionally, this dessert is draped in a veil of spun caramel threads – and that was the one part I didn't quite manage! Instead, I had the idea of tucking in chocolate-dipped strawberries – dipped in white or dark chocolate, or caramel – along with a few flowers between the puffs.