Croquembouche… Literally ‘crunch in the mouth’. Also known as a French Wedding Cake. It’s made from profiteroles that have been stacked around a cone and held together with caramel. It can be quite fiddly but I enjoyed making it. The profiteroles are filled with a white chocolate chantilly cream.

I used my choux party recipe from the salted caramel éclairs a few weeks ago. It worked very well, I put it down to the strong bread flour and high salt content. Make sure your filling errs on the sweet side to counteract the shells. I thought I’d need loaaaads of profiteroles so I doubled the recipe… Yeah, definitely didn’t need that much. A significant proportion went in the freezer after baking and the rest are sitting in the fridge a bit lonely. I sustain some form of burn 9/10 times when I work with sugar and this was one of those times… Be very careful – molten sugar is soooo hot and now I have some horrible looking burn on my hand. Ironically it’s not even from when I was dipping the profiteroles in sugar but from when I was clearing up!

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Just take a moment to consider the title, caramelised white chocolate… White chocolate that has been caramelised. Caramelising stuff has the extraordinary ability to make anything taste at least 100 times better than normal so as soon as you put some good quality (*cough* Green&Blacks *cough*) white chocolate through the process the result is actually magical.

I thought this was fitting for the festive period. It’s light enough to eat after a heavy dinner but indulgent enough to satisfy your high expectations for Christmas food.

I used Greek yoghurt in the cheesecake to make it a bit lighter and higher in protein but you can use sour cream. I got the caramelised white chocolate idea from a couple of blogs quite a while ago but I was waiting for the perfect time to try it out. Yeah, no hesitation necessary. This stuff is AMAZING. It’s pretty time consuming but you could definitely consider yourself an alchemist after trying it because it’s pretty outside the box.

My mind has already gone a bit crazy thinking about all the stuff I could do with it… Cakes, cookies, doughnuts, the possibilities are endless and I actually can’t wait.

Ok anyway, back to the cheesecake. My mum is actually Cheesecake Queen in our family so I sought her advice throughout the process – she is basically Wikipedia. Make the base first. I used whatever biscuits I had in the pantry at the time but if you need some direction then digestives or chocolate biscuits work great. I actually used some of the left over chocolate gingerbread from my Gingerbread House.

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