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
Musings of a Frequent Flying Scientist 
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