Piece Montée

A piece montée, which means "mounted piece" in French, also commonly known as croquembouche, refers to an assembled structure of cream puffs to form a towering dessert centerpiece. Cream puffs are truly reminiscent of my childhood; my mum made the best and whilst I love eating them, I've never attempted making cream puffs before. Pâte à choux was on my to-bake-before-Paris list, so I was extremely excited when I first learned about May's challenge. 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. 

This is somewhat a grand debut to Daring Bakers by my standards; not only do I have to make the pâte, make the crème pâtissière, fill the puffs, but a key part of this challenge involves the assembly of the puffs to form a magnificent structural cone. That's technique, baking, time management and presentation skills all rolled into one! Great practice for the pastry school days to come!

They say that third time's always a charm and that was exactly the number of tries I had attempted when it came to the pâte à choux. There's nothing extraordinarily difficult about making the choux pastry but somehow, my lack of focus and poor time management led to the first couple unsatisfactory attempts. I was busy chatting online and cooking the pastry dough at the same time, then lost count on the quantity of eggs I had added to the dough, resulting in a runny batter; the puffs were flat. The second batch had the perfect consistency but I ran out of time since I was already running late for an appointment with my girlfriends and ended up having to turn off the oven, leaving the puffs in there to cook for the rest of the time. When I got home, I was welcomed to the wonderful rich aroma of baked and crispy puffs! I think this is such a humbling lesson for me to never take such a lackadaisical approach, especially when I'm in Paris. Focus, focus, focus!

The assembly of the croquembouche was, surprisingly, uneventful compare to the making of the puffs. My caramel became slightly hardened midway through the tower, but it was an easy fix of simply reheating it (on low). I went to town with the spun sugar, pulling, stretching the webs of cooked sugar over the entire tower. 

It was a fun change to not only bake, but put together a dessert centerpiece. 

I'm looking forward to assemblying one of this someday but until then, I think I'll be happy making just enough puffs for two, then digging into the individual cream puffs as-is, sans the tower.

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