Croquembouche with coffee-kahlua cream and chocolate sauce *Daring Bakers*

Here, we (the daring bakers) are again this month with a Piece Montee (mounted piece) or croquembouche -a true crunch in the mouth dessert!!!According to Cat (this month's hostess) of Little Miss Cupcake, this is served as a traditional wedding cake in France. Now that is really really awesome. They are also served at baptisms and communions as well. As for me, I have only seen this in the baking books thahttp://www.blogger.com/t I own and always wondered if I will ever make something as humungous as that..I did but on a rather small scale. According to Cat, The classic piece montée is a high pyramid/cone made of profiteroles (cream-filled puff pastries) sometimes dipped in chocolate, bound with caramel, and usually decorated with threads of caramel, sugared almonds, chocolate, flowers, or ribbons.

Of all the pastries I've done this had the most dramatic effect owing to the conical structure of cream filled choux balls. The cream here being a coffee cream with some kahlua for comapny. I halved the recipe and got 12 choux pastries. The tower appeared precarious at firsst in the pictures I've seen. What you basically need to do is bake the choux balls and fill them with cream. I piped them into the balls. They were then dipped individually into a lightly cooked caramel syrup and set on top of one another. As the syrup cooled they set the balls in place. After the shape was formed, a fork was used to spin a web of caramel syrup around the construction.Chocolate sauce and the coffee-kahlua cream were then dripped.

Intrigued on how the process goes???Then here's the recipe . My only additions were adding 2 T of Kahlua to the coffee cream.

I enjoyed assembling it especially spinning the sugar threads around it...

Visit the daring bakers for more amazing croquembouches.

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.