How to Make a Profiterole Tower // Croquembouche // French Wedding Cake

Have you ever wondered how profiterole towers are made? How do they stand up on their own? Do you need special equipment for them? I’m going to show you! Today I am breaking down exactly how we create a croquembouche, which is used in France as wedding cakes but we endorse having them at any party because they are so impressive and delicious. Croquembouche are held up with just caramelized sugar, they don’t need any internal structure. They are finished with fine strands of spun sugar to give them an ethereal feel that makes them glisten. We highly recommend them as a centerpiece for your next special gathering. Your guests can break off pieces themselves to eat for an immersive dessert experience! We hope you enjoy this video on how to make a profiterole tower 🙂

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00:00 Intro
00:39 Making Choux & Pastry Cream
02:09 Prepping and Filling Choux Pastry
06:00 Cooking Caramel
08:37 Dipping Choux
10:13 Assembling Croquembouche Tower
16:00 Adding Spun Sugar

Tools & Equipment:
Batch of 60-70 choux
Batch of pastry cream to fill your choux
Ateco piping tip set https://geni.us/AtecoRoundPiping
Piping bag https://geni.us/12PipingBag
Probe Thermometer https://geni.us/ProbeThermo
10” cake board

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Bour cake friends today we have got a French pastry inspired video for you today I’m going to show you how to turn the humble cream puff or peritol into a Croom which is an elegant tower that is actually used as a French wedding cake I’m going to put a festive spin on it

Because T the season but feel free to decorate it with whatever you’d like sugar flowers Isa Mal any decorations you’d like I would love to hear in the comments from you if you enjoyed this French pastry Style video and if you want to see more like this instead of

All cakes all the time let me know there in the comments while you’re there hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on anything else that’s coming up grab your pastry bags turn on your twinkle lights and let’s create this showstopping Croom centerpiece together I’m starting off by

Making a batch of shoe and yes that is not s h o e it’s spelled c h uux and you can either check out my recipe in the fine spin cakes Academy or just use your favorite cream puff and pastry cream recipe it’s all pretty much

Going to work the same here but of course I am a little biased and I do think my tastes best so I am piping out the shoe here into even rounds we’re going to egg wash those score them with a fork and this just make sure that they rise evenly and

We’re going to place those into the oven we rotate about halfway through when they are a little bit more Brown than this I actually rotated them too early so don’t do that and next we are making a batch of pastry cream so this is our classic vanilla pastry cream so delicious but

Feel free to use any flavor that you’d like don’t make a mess like that now tempering our pastry cream rotating our shoe once more and then whisking and whisking until the pastry cream is all together how good does that look anyway now we are spreading it out on our

Sheet and I’m going to try and make this as even as possible too covering the surface with plastic wrap and we are ready to go so all of our shoe are completely cooled to room temperature now and they are nice and crispy so I have separated the kind of prettier ones

And the not quite as pretty ones which I don’t think are going to make quite as nice of a cro OU because they’re not exactly super round I generally look for like a really nice puffy round shape and that is the ideal shape that we that we

Really want to look for so I’ve put the good ones here there are 60 in total and we have poked holes in the bottom of each of these using an a TECO 800 tip any small round tip is going to work perfectly but it’s really easy you just

Poke a hole into the bottom so that uh we can insert another piping tip in there to fill it with pastry cream our pastry cream is also chill down so remove the top plastic wrap and it should peel right off like so then what I like to do is kind of roll

It up into almost like a little Japanese omelette and you can take this and put it right into your mixing bowl so it’s quite stiff right now and we want to loosen that up just a little bit so we’ll put it into our mixer with our whisk

Attachment and let this run just until it’s smooth do not overx this otherwise it’s going to start to lose its structure so it should still be really nice and thick and hold its shape but it shouldn’t have big lumps or chunks anymore I’ve got my eco 840 tip in with

Just a normal fabric Piping Bag and I’m going to fill this bag up about halfway again you don’t want to overfill your bag otherwise it’s going to be really annoying okay now we can begin filling our shoe but it’s quite simple you just stick your piping tip right in there and

You want to fill it up until you can feel pressure kind of pushing your Piping Bag out and then you’ll see there’s extra pastry cream that comes out which is normal just wipe it on the side of your bowl to get rid of the excess and then place it down and you’ll

Just fill these all the same way so as you’re filling you’re going to need to refill your Piping Bag so again use your bench scraper to clean it out just make sure all that pastry cream is scraped down to the bottom and then refill F the whole bag all at once so as

You’re making your cro onou you could also use uh whipped cream filling like a chantilli cream if you want something a little bit lighter you could do different flavors of past your cream so this one is flavored just with vanilla bean but we also love flavoring pastry cream with chocolate hazelnut paste

Whatever kind of thicker paste you’d like um there’s so many recipes for different pastry creams online so I’m sure you could find a flavor that you love you can also use loose any type of soft filling that’s pipeable I think would be okay so when you are filling

Your shoe uh hot tip is just to fill it up as I mentioned until the Piping Bag feels like there’s some pressure going back on it but also your shoe should feel quite heavy now you’re going to be able to tell a huge difference between

Like a full one and an empty one as you get a little bit more experience as you go through all of them you’ll be able to feel if it’s actually full or not quite full enough we are ready to dip our shoe in Sugar so first of course we need to make the

Caramel and I’m scaling out 500 G of just plain granulated sugar and then I’m going to scale out 150 g of corn syrup which is 30% by weight and I would prefer having clear corn syrup but we only have the brown one so we’re just going to work with it this just helps

Prevent crystallization you can also use glucose it’s just a little bit harder with brown corn syrup of course to see when your sugar is caramelizing you can always use a thermometer and I’m going to cook a dry caramel um you can cook either wet or dry whichever you prefer I.E you can

Add the water now um and let that cook off or you can cut it cook it just like this so I’m using a fork to stir this to prevent any crystallization from happening but the corns syrup should be there to help with that as well so I’m just wiping down the sides

Of the pot with water and a clean pastry brush and this just helps prevent crystallization it will help your caramel cook a little bit more evenly so we are cooking this caramel to 170 Celsius just waiting for it to finish I’m going to stop it a little bit early

Because it’s going to continue to heat up in the pot because the pot’s still going to have residual heat so I think I’m going to stop it at like one 60 oh now so next we want to put it in this ice bath well it’s just cold water but

It’s going to stop the cooking process so just keep it there for a little bit I’m going to place it back on the induction burner but I’m not going to turn that on right now if your caramel begins to harden then you can turn it

Back on um or if it gets too thick but right now this looks good it’s quite clear we’re just waiting for some bubbles to go away and then it should be ready to use so I will wear gloves for this because I always burn myself and

I’d like to avoid that today and I’ve got a 10-in white cake board here I’ve got some towels here I’m actually going to PR out my sugar like this so that it’s a little bit easier to dip and we are putting a Le Shoe at the bottom

Couple options we could dip each one of them in sugar and I’ll show you how to do that so I’m grabbing it really just like as far down as possible this is super hot guys please be careful I’m just going to dip and then remove the

Excess and place it down so this is one option you can do this for each of them if you want the extra caramel or that shiny look um I might do like half and half um half naked and then half dipped like that so let’s dip these guys I’m rewarming my caramel a little bit um you can come take a look at all of our shoe that are covered so they just have a really nice light caramel covering I like to do this when the caramel is still quite fresh and hot um so that the

Layer doesn’t become super thick so my caramel is reheated now it is nice and liquid so we can remove that if it starts getting too dark put it back into your cooling bowl and then um it will stop the cooking allog together but I think it should be okay right now I’ll

Just keep an eye on it we are ready to assemble I always try and grab shoe that are about the same size for the base and I’m going to do the naked ones for the base and then work my way up alternating between the shiny and then the naked so

I’m just going to put these aside we want 11 on our base I actually did a couple extra um I think I did about 66 in total I’m going to dip the side in caramel and then I’m going to stick it right on my board and there is

Literally no moving this after it’s set so make sure you like the spot that it’s in and you’re going to work your way around I like to kind of play with the shoe first to make sure I like the way it’s fitting before I commit to putting

It anywhere so this one’s going to fit in right here I’m going to dip this side and the bottom as well if you kind of just just dip on that angle there that usually does the trick so I’m kind of smushing them together really making sure they

Adhere so the way to know how many shoe you’re going to need um usually each layer has one fewer than the one before so we’re starting off with 11 then we’re going to go to 10 9 8 etc etc sometimes it’s not perfect that’s why we have extra but it’s a good starting

Point otherwise you’re just going to be guessing and that’s not good because if you get to the top as I have before and I had no shoe left you have to be really creative to figure out how to fill that space of course make sure that you’re going in

A really nice round circle um we don’t want any weird angles figure out where your last ones are going before you add them on and for our final one in the row we want to put a little bit on either side and then at the other side of the

Base and I would just let this sit until the caramel feels solid like our first ones here are already ready to go so this should just take a minute or so for our next layer we are going to do approximately 10 of the caramel covered ones and you just want to smush them

Between the two so they’re staggered and you probably want to hold them in place just until they feel feel secure enough so the caramel is reheated just until it was nice and liquid again again we’re testing out which shoe we like in which spot each time we put it in

Because sometimes they just won’t really fit properly and be very careful with this caramel burns are no joke it’s extremely hot uh like 170 Celsius so far above boiling so yes I would have a cold water bath nearby just in case and the way that I’m lining these up I’m actually

Looking from above to see if it’s just coming inwards a little bit um I don’t look so much from the side although of course that’s important but to get the proper shape you have to look from above sometimes you get to the end and it’s kind of an awkward spot and you’re

Not really sure what to put there so you can either do one bigger one like this and kind of just cheat it in there and like push those in a little bit or you can try and fit two smaller ones I’m not sure we’re going to be able to but we

Can try we don’t have like a ton of small guys yeah I think it’ll be too tight so let’s just grab one of our bigger ones like this and it will work just put a good amount of caramel on that so that it doesn’t move around then you can kind of smush it

Into place and I didn’t mention yet but cocono are meant to be eaten the day that they’re made because the pastry cream needs to be chilled and you cannot put caramel in the fridge so it’s really what they call an alaminute type dessert you should make it and eat it

Immediately as stressful as it is to like make for a party or something it is really fun so when you’re at the last layer what I usually like to do I’ve added three here and I think I’m going to add two like this and then I’m going to add

One on top so I’ll attach these together first so really make sure this one is set and then I put one aside that I thought would be nice for the top and just dip the bottom of that and place it on top then we are ready to do some Sponge

Sugar some fine spun fine spun sugar I cut this whisk so that I could have a sponge sugar device and it would be faster for me um so basically your caramel needs to be hardening just a little bit so that you can create these strings and then you just wrap them

Around your croon you can also make like pieces of this on parchment paper if you want it to be a bit fluffier and kind of like away from the kro com itself but usually I do it like this CU I do like a cleaner look and this will definitely begin to

Melt quickly so that is why we need to do this last minute it’s not like an ideal dessert to be having to be traveling sorry in the summer not ideal in the summer or not ideal to travel at all because there’s humidity in the air

Always so I thought it might be fun to kind of make this into a full centerpiece um so I turned it into a bit of a Christmas tree I added some twinkle lights just like really cheap ones from the dollar store of course remove those

Before you want to eat them and we added a little star cookie on top and I think this would make a perfect centerpiece for your holiday Gatherings thank you so much for watching again let me know in the comments if you enoyed this pastry focused video I would love to make more

Of them for you if you do hit that subscribe button while you’re there like this video and happy holidays I will see you in the new year