Showstopping Anniverary Chocolate Ruffle Cake

I have had a long love affair with this cake. The moment I clapped eyes on it at the Leicester Square Patisserie Valerie, I knew I had to have it for my wedding (the fact that I hadn't started even dating Sam at this point didn't really matter). It's towers of glorious chocolate ruffles were just too luxurious and beautiful to resist! And when I found out that it had a pile of profiteroles inside, well, that was just the icing on the cake so to speak (pun intended). The fact that I couldn't make our own wedding cake was a slight annoyance on my part, but when I knew I could have something way beyond my capabilities, it seemed worth it to order one from a specialist company. Of course, wedding cakes aren't cheap, but you get what you pay for. And indeed, I found out from this recipe attempting to recreate it for our wedding anniversary, that in fact the cake was worth every penny!

I was encouraged to have a go since my baking skills had developed a lot during the past year. I now didn't feel as scared about things like "choux pastry" and profiteroles. I had extensive experience with sugar syrups, so I felt pretty confident about my ability to stick a croquembouche together (although having said that, our wedding cake seemed to be stuck together with some kind of chocolate buttercream, but this didn't stop me from thinking that this was the opportunity to try to construct a croquembouche). I was also looking for an opportunity to make crème patissiere, which I knew had to be part of every baker's repertoire worth her/his salt. It isn't as scary as it sounds, and actually simple to make, and the end results were so delicious, I couldn't believe I hadn't tried it before.

To construct a croquembouche, you traditionally stick profiteroles together around a stainless steel mould. As a student, obviously I don't have any money for any expensive equipment like that, but I luckily, Ann Reardon from "How to Cook That" came to the rescue. She had the ingenious idea of simply rolling up some cardboard into a cone shape and lining it with baking paper so that it could become a mould.

Another part of this recipe involves modelling chocolate, which is simply the most fantastic thing ever. It is much more flexible and easy to work than icing, it doesn't crack, and most importantly, it tastes great! I know modelling chocolate is more expensive than icing, but I'd rather spend a bit more on something people will actually eat, rather than pay for icing/fondant which people will all leave on their plate and will end up going in the bin. 

None of the skills involved here are really that difficult, so you too can make a cake like this to impress friends and family!

Ingredients 

Profiteroles

125 ml/4.5 fl oz water

125 ml/4.5 fl oz milk

100 g butter, cut into small pieces

1/2 tsp salt

5 g/1 tsp sugar

150 g/5 oz flour

4 eggs

Crème patissiere

4 egg yolks

125 g/4.5 oz sugar

40 g flour

500 ml/18 fl oz milk

Vanilla extract or vanilla pod

2 tbsp limoncello or other liqueur (optional)

Caramel for constructing the croquembouche

75 ml water

225 g white caster sugar

1 tbsp liquid glucose/light corn syrup (to stabilise the caramel)

Modelling Chocolate

500 g/18 oz white chocolate

500 g/ 18 oz milk chocolate

280g/16 tablespoons glucose/corn syrup

4 tablespoons water

Decorative plaque

50 g white chocolate

Tube of chocolate writing, or tempered milk chocolate

Method:

Preparation of the modelling chocolate (1 - 2 days in advance)

Start with the modelling chocolate because ideally you're going to let it set for at least three hours, but preferably overnight. If you work with the chocolate while it's still warm, it has a tendency to ooze out the fats emulsified in it, and it doesn't hold its shape very well. 

1. Break up the chocolate into squares and melt using your preferred method. I like to just melt in 30 s bursts in the microwave, stirring really thoroughly between each one. Make sure all the chocolate bits are melted.

2. Measure out four tablespoons of the glucose syrup into a cup and add one tablespoon of water. Give a short burst in the microwave (15 - 20 s) to get up to roughly the same temperature as the chocolate.

3. Stir the glucose-water mixture thoroughly and then pour into the melted chocolate. Then carefully stir the glucose solution into the melted chocolate until just mixed. Do not overmix

4. After mixing, turn out onto a large piece of clingfilm, and spread out flat to help speed up the cooling process. Allow to cool down and set for three hours in the fridge, or overnight at room temperature.

5. After setting, the chocolate will feel quite hard, but gently work the dough on a work surface until pliable. There should be no need for any corn flour or icing sugar as there is for fondant. If the mixture is a bit crumbly, it means that more syrup is required (all chocolates are slightly different, and the measurements in this recipe are only a guide). Leave to rest again at room temperature until needed. If it has been worked too much, warms up and starts to feel a bit greasy and soft, put it back in the fridge for 30 min to 1 hour. 

Profiteroles

In the mean time, make the profiteroles

1. Preheat oven to 220 C (428 F). Place the water, milk and butter into a saucepan and heat until the butter has melted

2. Add the flour in one go, and keep stirring until the flour starts to cook and the mixture thickens. You'll know when it is ready when the mixture starts to come away from the sides as you stir. 

3. Continue to heat and stir for one more minute. This is known as the "drying" stage, and it is important to get really crispy profiteroles. But don't over dry, otherwise your profiteroles will crack! Make sure to keep to one minute only!

When the choux pastry starts to come away from the pan

4. Take off the heat or transfer to a bowl and then immediately add in the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition to ensure that each egg is fully incorporated (you don't want lumps of egg in your profiteroles!)

5. Put the pastry into a piping bag, and pipe small circles onto two baking paper-lined baking sheets.  Try to avoid getting points on them, like mine! The profiteroles will rise and expand a little during cooking, so don't put them so close where they might grow into each other. 

Pipe out the choux pastry into round shapes to make the profiteroles

6. Bake for 20 minutes, until they are crisp. If any profiteroles come out soft by this time, just pop them back in for a few minutes, as ideally, you need them to be soft on the inside and crisp on the outside. 

Profiteroles when they're done

Creme patissiere

1. Whisk the egg yolks and half the sugar in a bowl until they are pale and form a ribbon. 

2. Sift in the flour and mix well.

3. Combine the milk, remaining sugar and vanilla and bring to the boil.

4. When the milk begins to bubble a little, pour about one-third onto the egg yolk-sugar mixture and whisk thoroughly. Pour this back into the pan and cook over a gentle heat, stirring continuously. Don't take your eye off it at this point, because it will become lumpy or burn! Cook for 2 minutes, and then pour into a large flat dish, to help speed up the cooling time (at this point, I also added a couple of tablespoons limoncello for flavour, but you don't have to add this, or you can try any other liqueur).. Place a layer of cling-film directly on the surface of the cream to prevent a skin from forming while you leave it to cool. 

5. When the cream reaches room temperature, it can be used to fill the profiteroles. Simply cut small slits into each profiterole, then load the cream into a piping bag and squeeze inside enough to fill a profiterole, but not so much that it oozes out. 

Caramel for the assembly of profiteroles

When the profiteroles are all filled, then it's time to prepare your mould and then the sugar syrup. I stuck together two pieces of soft A4 card with sellotape and, and then curled it up into a cone shape, securing with more tape and staples. This was large enough to take the majority of the profiteroles. 

Pink and green card stapled and sellotaped together to form a cone

For the caramel:

1. Dissolve the sugar in the water over a high heat, and mix in the glucose syrup (this prevents the sugar crystallising out of solution). 

2. Once the sugar has dissolved, don't stir any more, and allow the sugar to heat up and become a syrup, about six minutes or so. When it reaches about 150 C, or when it just turns golden, remove from the heat (but do not cool in a water bath or anything).

Boiling the sugar syrup - be careful!

3. Put the mould into a large cup or glass to stabilise it while you construct the croquembouche. Pick out the nicest looking profiterole that you have an place it up side down in the mould, as this will be the top of your croquembouche. 

Then take the next profiterole, and dip into the hot sugar syrup, then quickly press into the first profiterole to stick them together. 

**BE VERY CAREFUL WITH THE HOT SYRUP. DO NOT USE LATEX GLOVES** The syrup will be well over boiling point, and can cause some extremely nasty 2nd or even 3rd degree burns if you're not careful (I accidentally got a few drops splashback on my skin, and got huge blisters which still haven't healed two weeks later!). Do not use latex gloves, because they are made from a natural rubber-like product, and will simply melt in the heat. In a really bad situation, the latex can meld to your skin, and must be removed by surgery! 

In the end, I ended up wearing my oven gloves, but even this was difficult so I used some metal tongs to pick up and dip each profiterole. This was a bit awkward to start with, but you can quickly get used to handling things with it, and its a heck of a lot safer.

You can use metal tongs to dip the profiteroles into the hot sugar syrup

4. Continue in this way, gluing each of the profiteroles together, going around the edge of the mould, until you have reached the top. 

5. Leave to cool for a few minutes, and then tip the croquembouche out by placing a plate on the top of the mould and turning it upside down. Carefully adjust the tower, and place in any remaining profiteroles in order to get it straight. 

Release the croquembouche from the "mould"

6. Now, at this point, a proper croquembouche would involve putting a delicate but very pretty layer of "angel hair" or thin sugar threads around for decoration. If you want to do this, there should be enough caramel left over to adequately decorate the cake. Just take a couple of forks, and drag from the pan long thin strands of sugar and wind it around the profiterole tower. If the caramel is too hot, the sugar strands will break and fall back into the pan, but if it is too cold, you won't be able to drag the forks through. Keep the caramel on a very low heat to try and get it to exactly the right temperature to create the strands.

If, however, you want to create the chocolate ruffle cake, do not add the angel hair, because it will prevent the chocolate from sticking to the profiteroles properly. 

Attaching the modelling chocolate ruffles

1. Once you're satisfied with the shape and size of your profiterole tower, prepare the chocolate ruffles by gently kneading the modelling chocolate before rolling out. I recently discovered that apparently the best way to roll modelling chocolate is using a pasta machine! Previously, I just rolled it out using the traditional rolling pin method, but I found that it was quite difficult to get the chocolate to an even thickness all over. The pasta machine discovery was not only convenient because it solved this problem, but also because I happened to have one lying around (and my mother said it would never be of any use!). I gently rolled out a quarter of each chocolate dough to about half an inch (1 cm) thickness so that it could be fed into the pasta machine, and then rolled it using the thickest setting (9 in my case). This was thick enough so that the chocolate ruffles could be secured to the profiteroles whilst maintaining their integrity so that the ruffles didn't flop. 

Rolling out the modelling chocolate using a pasta machine

2. Cut the modelling chocolate into 1 - 2 inch strips (depending upon preference) using a serrated pastry wheel (to get that jagged effect). Then gently pick up the strips and press onto the profiteroles in the desired ruffle shape. It might be difficult to get the chocolate to stick at first, but if you press with your hands, the heat from them can help to melt it a little, and the chocolate can become a bit more malleable. I would also recommend to use some gloves whilst handling modelling chocolate, as it can be prone to gaining an imprint of your fingerprints if over handled!

Pressing the layers on to the profiteroles

3. I started with attaching about 20 cm strips of the milk modelling chocolate, and then moved on to two layers of the white modelling chocolate. Once finished, dust with a little icing sugar, to really accentuate the layers!

4. The quantities of modelling chocolate in this recipe are generous, so there will be plenty of modelling chocolate left to make additional decorations such as chocolate roses. I will not give a tutorial here, as there are already many great tutorials out there. I can recommend the ones from the Sugar Hero and also the My Cupcake Addiction YouTube channel.

Decorative plaque

1. If you want to make the decorative plaque, temper the white chocolate, and then pour into a large serrated cookie cutter, and leave for ten minutes to set. If the chocolate was tempered properly, it should only take about ten minutes to set, whereas if it's just heated up, it will take hours to set!

2. Once set, gently edge it out of the cookie cutter. Write your desired design onto the plaque using the chocolate writing, or put some tempered milk chocolate into a piping bag and cut a very small hole on the end or a small piping tip. Place on the front of your cake and arrange any extra decorations as desired. 

This cake makes a great showstopper, but make sure you have plenty of hungry guests, because this cake doesn't keep well for long! The cream only keeps well for one or two days in the fridge, and the profiteroles get squashed under the weight and tend to go soggy if left for too long. Also, the caramel can dissolve if left in a moist atmosphere. But on the plus side, it's so delicious that with several hungry people, it's bound to disappear quickly!