Croquenbouche

Croquenbouche: From the French, "croque" for crisp or crispy, and "bouche" for mouth.

The croquenbouche is an old traditional French wedding staple. For a while, it had kind of faded away, but has been making a resurgence lately.

The croquenbouche you see pictured here is made of puff pastry. Essentially, it is a tower of cream puffs. You'll see the spiral effect made by alternating puffs dipped in caramel, versus puffs dipped in caramel and then in "sucre gran". (Your second French lesson for today: Sucre = sugar, gran = large. And that's exactly what it is, large crystals of sugar that actually resemble kosher salt.) The croquenbouche is seated on a base of almond nougatine. The topper is made of melted sugar that I piped onto a silpat in an interlocking pattern. I then took the pieces and "glued" them all together with more melted sugar to get the "fountain" effect you see in the picture.

I think the croquenbouche would be a very cool alternative to a wedding cake. One drawback is that all the cream puffs must be filled, and the croquenbouche assembled, all on the day of the wedding. Cream puffs really don't last more than 1 day once filled.