1 month in advance: decide to make a croquembouche, a culinary relic on the level of the galantine, the subtlety and the chaud-froid, for your roommate’s birthday. Feel pleased with yourself.

2 weeks in advance: consult the fount of all wisdom – the interwub. Search for your hero’s blog post about the one time he made a croquembouche. Discover that he titled it “This will never work.” Exult.

1 week in advance: enlist the one person you know who’s crazy enough to actually want to help. Do your ingredient math. You need a lot of everything. Completely underestimate how much sugar you’ll have to melt to make the thing hold together. Forewarned that a croquembouche mold will cost a prep cook’s monthly salary, hit upon the idea of building the croquembouche over the outside of your largest mixing bowl. Completely fail to realize how idiotic an idea this is. Ignorance is bliss.

The night before: make pastry cream. A lot of pastry cream. Like, more pastry cream than you have room for in your fridge. Fortunately, making pastry cream is hungry work. Eat some space clear for pastry cream. Begin to panic, because you realize that you really should have put more thought into planning this than you actually did. Realize that none of your ingenious plans for using mixing bowls will result in a sufficiently imposing edifice. Look at proper molds online. 15 pounds of sheet steel shaped like an ice cream cone, suitable for absolutely no other purpose except acting as the casing for a MIRV, costing as much as a dishwasher makes in a week. No one delivers overnight. Contemplate using roommate’s trombone case as a mold. Which will make it 3’ tall. Jubilation till you realize you don’t have enough pastry cream for that.

Morning of: Meet David. Debate engineering a mold using sheet steel (cheaper than ready made, but requires arc welder. Darn). Decide that the old method of making croquembouche should have been buried with Vatel. Cheap, fast and disposable is the way of the future. Get inspired by art supply store near apartment. Foamcore is the building material of tomorrow. Go home, make mountain of choux. Aren’t they pretty?

Lunchtime of: Because you both think like engineers, worry that boiling sugar will make foamcore melt. Try unsuccessfully to find out the melting point of foamcore on the interwub. Fire caution out the larboard chaser and go ahead. Make pyramidal croquembouche mold of doom (Model 32459, with stand) from 1/2” foamcore and USPS packing tape (I’m working on a pdf instruction booklet), and a big bloody Xacto. Cost: about one hourly wage at McDonalds. Kick yourself afterwards because you realize it could have been so much better.

Afternoon of: Start filling choux with pastry cream. Make batch of caramel, begin to assemble croquembouche, muttering “this will never work” under your breath the whole time. Burn fingers. Curse as caramel begins to thicken and set in the pot. Learn why surgical gloves are so handy when dealing with caramel. Burn fingers again. Dribble caramel over half the kitchen, making titanic mess. Ponder insulating qualities of choux pastry. Make another batch. Repeat 5 times. Mold successfully filled. Still has structural integrity, though worryingly warm. Carry it outside to set the caramel, because foamcore is a terrific insulator. Hold your breath. Invert mold.

Tom had to extract his croquembouche with a blowtorch. We simply peel our mold off the tower. No one will ever make croquembouche the old way again!

Croquembouche, with and without David’s arm for scale. Yes, that is about 20” high.

Happy Turkey Day!

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"A recipe for disaster" was written on 23 Nov 2006 and filed in General, Techniques / Recipes, Tools