Ann Reardon

Croquembouche recipe Profiterole Tower

croquembouche recipe profiterole tower

Croquembouche (crockenbush) are beautiful towers of custard filled profiteroles held together with caramelised sugar. This one is then wrapped in fine strands of pulled sugar. It looks impressive as a dessert centrepiece but is surprisingly easy to make.

Croquembouche Profiterole Recipe Ingredients
This recipe makes enough to make a croquembouche that is 27cm (10.63 inches) tall and 10cm (3.94 inches) in diameter at the base.

For the Choux Pastry Recipe
1 cup or 250millilitres (8.45 fluid ounces) Water
75g (2.65 ounces) or 1/3 cup Butter
160g (5.64 ounces) or 1 cup plain all purpose Flour
4 Eggs

croquembouche recipe easy

Heat the oven to 428ºF (220ºC)

Place the water and butter into a saucepan and heat until the butter is melted. Add the flour all at once and stir until it thickens and leaves the sides of the pan, continue to stir and heat for another minute until it forms a really stiff ball.
Remove it from the heat and add in the eggs one at a time mixing really well after each addition.

Place into a piping bag and pipe dollops onto the baking tray.
Bake for 20 minutes at 428ºF (220ºC) or until crisp.

Pastry Cream Recipe
500millilitres (16.91 fluid ounces) or 2 cups milk (4%)
4 egg yolks or 60g (2.12 ounces) – (you can use the whites for macarons or pavlova)
3/4 cup or 164g (5.78 ounces) sugar
30g (1.06 ounces) or 3 Tbsp flour
Whip the egg yolks and sugar until pale, whisk in the flour. Heat the milk, you can infuse it with flavour while it is heating, see the video for more help with this. Add a little hot milk at a time to the yolks mixture whisking as you do. Return to the pan and stir until well thickened.

Crispy Caramel and angel hair

150millilitres (5.07 fluid ounces) or 1/2 cup plus 1 Tbsp and 1 tsp water
450g (15.87 ounces) or 2 cups and 1 Tbsp sugar
21g (0.74 ounces) or 1 Tbsp liquid glucose or light corn syrup
Heat over high heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Wash down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush. Leave unstirred until it just starts to go golden. Remove from the heat.

Construct the Croquembouche

Make sure you are using non-stick baking paper so that your sugar does not stick to your mold.

You can buy a stainless steel mold for making larger croquembouche but they are expensive, so for making smaller ones you can see the video for making your own.

by Ann Reardon How To Cook That

My Cookbook

ann reardon crazy sweet creations cookbook
Stores that sell my book listed by country: http://bit.ly/ARcookbook
All recipe quantities in the book are in grams, ounces and cups.

85 Comments View Comments

  1. 2monitors

  2. Rating: 5

    I made this tonight, and am honestly really impressed with myself? i didn’t think i would be able to do it! But I did have one issue, the sugar syrup used to sick it together seemed to set Rock hard and it was basically inedible. Did I do something wrong, or just use too much?
    Also, when I tried to reheat the sugar mixture it just crystallised (it was pretty cool actually) is that because I stirred it?
    Thanks for any advice!

  3. Hi I tried to make THis. And it worked until the spinning sugar. The pastries started to fall and the sugar wasn’t turning into fine angel hairs. What did I do wrong????

  4. Hi Ann
    Thank you for all the yummy recipes and sharing with us the techniques of how to create them too… i tried making proliferoles n eclairs and followed the recipe step by step but for some reason am not getting it right… it not rising just spreading n the pastry is very runny. Do u put full eggs or just egg yolks… n i do use plain flour, correct?

  5. Hello, I have a question, I cooked the cream puffs and they did not rise and I would like to know what I did wrong.

  6. Hello Ann I tried this recipe it turned out perfect, but I have faced one problem, when i finished it I left out of the fridge for about 30 min and the top half of the tower fall off, plus the caramel hair started to melt. And if I want to deliver it as an order what should I do?

    • Hi Khwarla, You will need to ude more cramel to stick your profiteroles togther. As Ann suggests on the video, you should only make and decorate your tower with spun sugar no more than a half hour before serving, as the sugar will absorb moisture from the air. It sounds like you stored your tower in the fridge, which will cause the pastry and sugar to soften. For sugar decorations that are more stable, bakers will often use isomalt instead.

  7. Hi there. This looks great.
    Would like to know: Does it matter what size eggs you use anywhere in the recipe? Yours look like maybe a medium? Coles and Woolies always seems to have a tonne of XLs and Jumbos, but not much choice for large and even less for medium sizes

    Thanks very much

    • Hi JM, Ann shops in Aussie supermarkets and the eggs she buys are readily available. She usually gets eggs around 55-60 grams.

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