CROQUE MY BOUCHE UP

The croquembouche: the tower of delight that looms large at a wedding reception.  It knows that you know that you want some, with its sweet, fluffy, sticky, crunchy buns.  What a tart.  And with wedding season almost in full swing we have been experimenting with the croque construction conundrum: how to build?  

To pile or not to pile?  Upside down in a cone or upside up on a cone?  And crucially, what glue is the best glue?!  If feeding an army of half-cut wedding guests, the traditional stacking looks like a winner; the pile will be plentiful and hold its own as it’s demolished by greedy fingers.  But for the smaller party, sticking them around a cone provides the drama of height and presence without squashed profiteroles at the bottom (and if you’re going to croque it you may as well show off)(not a natural Local Sauce trait, obviously).  In this weeks Local Sauce lab, we opted for cone.

The building blocks for this sugary skyscraper (this construction analogy is just too good to let go) are so simple: choux buns with a creamy filling.  For an added bit of fluff to our buns, we tapped into the knowledge of a Mr.J.Martin, throwing half a cup of water into a hot dish at the bottom of the oven to steam them as they rose, before piercing and crisping.  He doesn’t lie! It works a treat, with plenty of space for the filling - crème patissière (or ‘chefs concrete’, I thank you Raymond Blanc for that one) for a proper job, or whipped cream for a quicky.

And so to glue: Chocolate vs Sugar syrup. In method one, our recipe championed melted chocolate as means to fix buns to base; a nice idea if building in, say, a fridge or a wind tunnel, but not in a little kitchen on a summer’s day.  The little bunners just wouldn’t hold!  With little warning and no fanfare, they gently slid down before an avalanche of buns hit the counter.  Not so much a thundering collapse as a sticky thud. Thud. Thud thud thud. Thud.  The thought of a sobbing bride, face awash with mascara and snot as she wails at the chocolatey heap is not appealing, even with the back-up arsenal of the ever comforting, “but it tastes great!”.   Suffice to say, the chocolate method is a potential minefield.  Avoid that one.

Croque and choc carnage.

Method two: sugar syrup, which again requires some fairly rapid cooling to prevent subsidence (still going....).  In House of Clever Hands we have at our disposal a fan; a massive, turbo, hyper-cooling beast with the thrust of a Boeing 747.  I cannot recommend the cooling fan enough; when choux + glue hit cone, and they really aren’t going anywhere.  As we worked from the foundations up (okay, that’s enough), the buns kept their shape beautifully, keeping their crispiness for the contrast of crunchy shell and explosion of the sweet, creamy filling.  But before punching the air, there is of course the taste test...  The Boy Wonder came home to find a monument to pastry and joy, and couldn’t help himself. “That’s really good that”.  

Achieved.  

Croquembouche with white chocolate and almonds

Phoar.

The recipes

You can find a good profiterole recipe here.  

For the sugar glue we dissolved 150g caster sugar in 250ml water before boiling the mixture for about 5  - 8 minutes until the mixture was super glue -py! It's handy to have a pot of water and a pastry brush to hand just in case the sugar crystallises at the side of the pan while it boils. Allow the glue to cool and thicken before use as croque glue. Good luck!

BRIOCHE CUSTARD EXPLOSION

I hereby bequeath this recipe to Gillian who requested it's feature on this blog and to Bart, living downstairs, whose main excitement of my friends coming over for dinner is that THIS might be in the oven. To his joy it often is.

This pud bounded into my life when I threw a 'food heritage party' - pretty geeky I know, but look what I learned! Huge thanks go to William who brought it along and more to Lily who confided her family recipe in him all those years ago.

This is my kind of food. Negligible faff and positively bursting with flavour. Boxes are ticked with incredible gusto: so simple, so sweet, so luxuriously indulgent and so bloody quick! This is perfect dinner party fodder. It takes 5 minutes to whip into the oven and then you can forget about it while you eat your meal. Yet another of this pudding's many accolades is that it really can't go wrong. How could it when it's core ingredients are brioche, cream, chocolate and raspberries?! The key is to keep the oven on a nice low heat so that the eggy custard thickens without splitting and the chocolate doesn't burn. Of course, this is calorific hell but Fat Is Flavour - just enjoy it!

Fresh from the oven, and dusted in icing sugar

2 minutes later and there were just 3 of us! Check that Ooozing Chocolate.

This has served 6 people and it has served 3, it depends how greedy you are!

Ingredients
300g brioche
150g creme fraiche
One punnet of raspberries
100ml double cream
4 tbsp caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
Lindt extra creamy chocolate bar - all in!
2 large eggs

Recipe
Preheat the oven to 140°C.
First make a custard by mixing the eggs, sugar, cream and creme fraiche together with the vanilla extract.
Tear up the brioche into large-ish chunks (enough for a small handful) and leave them to soak in the glorious custard mix. Meanwhile, break the chocolate into half squares.

Assemble
In an oven-proof dish, layer it up. Half of the wet brioche is followed by the chocolate which is followed by the raspberries (keeping a handful behind) and then the other half of the brioche on top. Pour the rest of the custard mix over and sprinkle with raspberries.
Cook for about 45 minutes before giving it a quick dusting of icing sugar et voila. Serve it hot, so all the chocolate is still oozing M&S food porn stylee.

CHOCOLATE COATED SALTED BUTTER CARAMELS. SWEETS FOR MY SWEET.

First, a note from the editor. 
A love for sweetened chewiness has long possessed my heart -

From early childhood years ago my passions thus did start.

From rubber teat to playtime sweet or sugar candied strips,

'twas rare that dribble wouldn't glisten hanging from my lips.

Dentists since have told me that my teeth have turned quite rotten

And doctors speak of 'gaining girth' but this I have forgotten.

For when sweet salted caramel is placed in reaching grasp,

In my sweet salted sweaty hands those brown gems I must clasp

And relish in their morishness and feel my heartbeat quicken 

As I indulge euphorically and feel my buttocks thicken.

Jenny Lewisohn

Yes, it's true. We're all in love in this house. Madly, desperately and passionately in love. In fact it's possibly more of an unhealthy obsession than love. It happened about a week ago when I brought home some of Bea's of Bloomsbury's chocolate salted butter caramels. It was a horrendous moment when I went to pay for them - £1 a chocolate, and a minimum of twelve chocolates. CHRIST! But, my feelings mellowed the instant I'd put one in my mouth. I was simply powerless to resist, destined for an ever-expanding waistline and rotted teeth, confidently culminating in bankruptcy. Unfortunately for me, they are everything I could want all in one place, the three ingredients I cannot live without: my holy trinity, my triple threat, my snap, crackle and pop: Butter, Salt and Sugar. They're all here and in such abundance with some cream thrown in! HOORAY! The total sum of these ingredients is a chewy but creamy, salty but sweet, chocolatey but caramelly..... Wow. My mouth is filling with saliva at the thought.

This house is not the first to fall for these luxurious treats and I doubt we'll be the last. It seems that the salted caramel first appeared on the scene in '70s Brittany, a region famed for it's salted butter. By the '90s Pierre Hermé had transformed these sweets into salted caramel macaroons and you can see it is in all sorts of forms these days, from salted caramel ice cream to M&S's best selling salted caramel profiteroles.

Here is the recipe for the chocolate coated salted buttered caramels. What a mouthful. And what a mouth full! You must measure carefully and should really have a sugar thermometer. I don't have a thermometer, so I had a guess at when to turn the heat on and off, which happily worked out fine.

Ingredients
180ml double cream

3/4 tbsp of flaky sea salt (Maldon)

160g golden syrup/corn syrup

200g caster sugar

4 tbsp salted butter

1 tsp vanilla extract

A large bar of dark chocolate

Do It!

Prepare a cake tin with lightly greased foil. 

Boil together the cream, vanilla and 2 tbsp of butter and 1/2 tbsp of salt. Once the pan has boiled, switch it off but keep it warm by keeping it on the hob.

Then, bring the sugar and golden syrup to the boil until it reaches 310°C. Add the other 2 tbsp of butter and turn the sugar off. 

Now, pour in the cream mixture. Turn the heat on again and boil to 270°C. 

Pour the mixture into the prepped cake tin and leave it to cool for 10 minutes before sprinkling the rest of the salt over the top. 

Wait another 15 minutes before you cut the sweets using a sharp knife. 

Melt the dark chocolate over a pan of boiled water and cover the caramels. 

Leave the chocolates to cool in the fridge. 

Try not to eat them all.