THE Croquembouche!
THE Croquembouche!

If you haven’t had tea with Justine yet, you’re missing out. Today (a day late!), I’m bringing a special birthday cake to Justine’s Tea Time #3 – always a fun event, with some delicious recipes, teas, cakes, and other assorted goodies 🙂

My croquembouche was a surprise gift from my parents for my most recent (milestone) birthday. Some backstory – I had my back garden done last year, and extended my patio. My lovely landscape gardener (no, I did not do it myself!!) is also my parents’ neighbour and he did a fantastic job. It turns out, he also is a chef (what a talented man, right?). Anyway, he made this gorgeous cake for me – apparently it was a crazy event preparing it, there was a production line of his family and mine and it arrived at my house about 2 hours prior to the party starting. We were instructed to put it in the office with the air conditioner going as it is meant to be assembled just before serving.

I left it in the capable hands of my friends and headed off to the hairdresser. About 20 minutes later, my mum phoned – “I don’t mean to worry you, but the power has gone out and we can’t turn anything on!”. Disaster – I had 20 people coming, including a mixologist (guy who makes cocktails).

When I arrived home, power was thankfully restored, but the air conditioner was broken and the croquembouche was in many pieces, having melted! Two of my friends were busy making new toffee and sticking it back together, while the third was making me cocktail 🙂  What you see in my photo is the “fixed” cake – they did a fabulous job of saving the day and it was absolutely delicious.

For you cake-afficionados – there were three flavours of profiteroles – strawberry, caramel and chocolate. The custards inside the profiteroles and the icing on the outside were all flavoured with strawberry, caramel and chocolate liqueurs. Yes, I was spoiled that night, it was the best party I’ve had so far, a blast!

Have you ever made a croquembouche? I’m sure I would make an absolute mess if I tried. I’m a scientist, so am very good at following a recipe, but not sure I could pull this one off!

x desleyjane

Posted by:desleyjane

photographer, blogger, planner, scientist, dog lover, frequent flyer, daughter, sister, BFF, human

50 replies on “A croquembouche for tea?”

  5. Belated Happy Birthday, Desley Jane! This looks amazingly sweet and deliciously messy 😀 I’ve never tried to make one personally. My style is more rustic, so I’m sure that my attempt at neat and delicate would be a complete disaster! haha!

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  6. Looks like heaven on earth 🙂 Never saw one of these cakes in Austria – some of friends who are more gifted in cooking need to try this out …I won’t manage that (or at least eat already half of it while preparing)….

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  7. Wow, so you popped up in my Reader since we are following each other Delsey. What a small world eh! I know Justine through another foodie site that we frequent called Fiesta Fridays :). Love your tea time treat, and belated birthday greetings.

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    1. Well, thank you so much! Certainly is a small world. I’ve been reading Justine’s posts for Fiesta Friday each week. I left you a comment on your blog last night 🙂

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  8. Desley, this is a scandalously delicious cake. Just reading made me desire to eat all different flavors.
    The making and breaking and final recovery was fantastic.
    You are surrounded by wonderful parents and friends. They are absolutely right to love you so much.
    Happy belated birthday and looking forward to the next cake!
    xxx

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  9. oh wow omg i think i just passed out. That cake looks absolutely amazing, you are really spoiling us and i never heard of such a cake, probably just as well would give me a heart attack of excitement if someone brought that int he house haha. Wow..in shock….can you tell?

    Happpy Birthday btw,w hen was it?

    Thank you sooo much for bringing this to tea time, please don’t forget to put yourself in to the Inlinkz so everyone gets to see this delight.

    I love the idea of the cocktail maker, what did you call them again? They do weird things now with smell cocktails or infusions or something? I am so out of it and not modern anymore lol xxx

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    1. LOL, yes it’s an amazing cake! We used to watch all those cooking shows and this was always the showstopper! X
      Oh, I forgot about the link, thanks for the reminder!
      My mixologist was named Matt and seemed about 12 years old, but he assured me he was of drinking age. He made 6 cocktails that we painstakingly selected, one we even invented! Which makes me think of next tea time’s submission 😉

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  16. Pingback: Tea Time #4 – come and join me | Eclectic odds n sods

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