Pile of Puffs

For our Daring Baker's challenge Cat of Little Miss Cupcake asked us to make a piece montée (aka croquembouche). The classic piece montée is a tall cone shaped tower of pastry cream filled cream puffs that are dipped in chocolate or caramel. The puffs are bound together with caramel to hold the cone shape.

There are 3 components: pate a choux (cream puff dough), pastry cream (to fill the cream puffs), and caramel or chocolate glaze (to "glue" the filled cream puffs into shape).

Making pate a choux is something I've done many times. You have to make sure the flour gets cooked until the dough forms a ball and there's a film on the bottom of the pot. Then it's ready for the eggs. I cheated a little and beat in the eggs using my KitchenAid stand mixer instead of by hand. The machine really helps work the dough so that the gluten will develop and hold the structure of the puff. But I've done it by hand in the past and have gotten successful puffs that way too. Using the given recipe and piping 1x1-inch puffs, I got 45 puffs which is way more than the 28 mentioned.

I didn’t really want to make a tall tower since it would be hard to transport it. So I made a sad little pile of cream puffs to photograph and keep for me and my husband. Thankfully Cat said we didn't have to make it super tall and that we're only required to make it a “mounted piece” meaning that it has some height. I know mine barely has any height and is a poor excuse for a croquembouche, but two people can only eat so much dessert. I filled all the remaining puffs, glazed them with chocolate and served them as individual cream puffs.



Even though Cat provided some recipes for pastry creams, she also gave us the freedom to use any crème patisserie we liked. I decided to make a coconut pastry cream since I was already making some for another baking project. I didn't feel like working with hot molten sugar so I chose to "glue" my puffs with melted chocolate instead of a caramel glaze. To finish them off I gave it a light dusting of finely shredded desiccated coconut just so you know that it's coconut.

So there you have it. Another Daring Bakers' challenge completed! To learn more about the Daring Bakers or to join the bakers, check out The Daring Kitchen.

The fine print:
The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

Malted Chocolate Cupcakes

Even though I regularly shop for groceries about once a week, I only go to the Asian supermarket once, maybe twice, a year so I tend to stock up on necessities. But I also tend to buy some things that I might not need like that big jar of Ovaltine I bought in early 2009. For those of you who have never heard of Ovaltine it's a brand of sweetened malted cocoa drink mix. My mother used to make it for me and my brothers when we were young. It seems like it was a pretty popular drink among Asian children back then. I think I haven’t had Ovaltine in almost 30 years! When I bought that jar of Ovaltine I planned to use it to make a malted chocolate cake, but I just never got around to it. Until now.

The recipe for the cake batter is adapted from "The Sweet Melissa Baking Book" by Melissa Murphy. It's one of the best recipes for devil's food cake I've tried recently. Melissa Murphy really knows her stuff. The cake had a wonderful chocolate flavor. There are two chocolates in the batter: unsweetened chocolate and Dutch-processed cocoa. The combination really gave the cake a deep chocolate flavor. The addition of coffee enhanced the chocolate and also added moisture. The sour cream also contributed to the moisture and tenderness. The cake was moist and not mushy at all. It held together really well when sliced.



I made cupcakes instead of a layered cake. The addition of chopped chocolate covered malted milk ball candy to the cupcake batter is optional. Adding them to the batter seemed like a good idea at the time, but when the cupcakes were baked, if any piece of candy happened to touch any part of the paper cupcake liner it stuck like crazy. Next time I would skip the addition of malt balls to the cake batter.

Even though I added some Ovaltine to the cake batter, I'm not sure if I could detect it in the final product. But I wasn't too concerned about the lack of malt in the cake since the frosting would have lots of Ovaltine. I made a butter and confectioners' sugar frosting with a healthy dose of Ovaltine thrown in. It was sweet and malty with just a hint of cocoa. It was the perfect complement to the devil's food cupcake.

When the cupcakes were all frosted and sitting prettily on the kitchen countertop, the air was filled with the scent of malt and chocolate. The aroma was so familiar and comforting. It really took me back to my childhood.