Croquembouche Wedding Cake

A traditional French pastry for nuptials is the croquembouche wedding cake. It's really fun to say with a Julia Child accent, try it. When we get a chance, we'll add the audio file. The name comes from the French words 'croque en bouche' meaning 'crunch in the mouth'.

This dessert is a mass of impressive profiteroles, or pastry puffs, filled with cream. When we make them, we fill them with vanilla ice-cream, which is an option for a stacked dessert at an event, only if it can be frozen beforehand, obviously! The cream puffs are then assembled in large pyramid shape, like a Christmas tree (shown above).

These cone shaped towers can be wrapped with spun sugar, bound with caramel, dipped in chocolate and decorated with embelleshments such as flowers made of fondant, candied almonds, ribbons, or dragees. One of our favorites was at a dear friend’s wedding at the Shannon-Kavanaugh House in San Francisco, adorned with candied almonds (shown above).

Instead of the traditional cake cutting, the bride and groom usually peel a few profiteroles off of the dessert, and feed to each other. It's best to have professional catering staff serve the rest, as it can get a bit messy, and must be carefully taken apart.

The cool thing about this dessert option is that you it's a great conversation and mingling piece. Similiar to a chocolate fountain or a cupcake display, you can let your guests serve themselves. This will help save costs on wait staff serving fees, but it will also encourage your guests to mingle and meet each other over serving themselves some messy profiteroles! If you feel that it's just too messy, or you don't have the kind of crowd that could pull it off eloquently, then have your wait staff handle it.

Here is a great "how-to" video on how to assemble a croquembouche cake. It's small and dipped in chocolate, but it gives anyone who is wanting to make their own an idea of how to do it. Enjoy!

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