Hello!

I made this following cream puff tower for my son’s 1st birthday. It is a tradition in our household to have a “smash-cake” that is not common.

If you Google, smash cake is usually a buttercream covered cake (although today some would have fondant cake, but that won’t be too easy for babies to smash, right?), and sometimes they are made entirely of chocolate.

But in our house, we made dessert towers! – of cake balls or cream puffs 😀

Why not regular cake?

Well, just because! They are easier, quicker, yet create the same messiness 😀

See? Hahaha!

You can use whatever filling you like for cream puff. From custard (vla), whipped cream, pastry cream, or even buttercream. I made it simple for this one though, I used store-bought chocolate pudding powder (like Jell-o brand and such). Prepare as package directed (which was only needing cold milk, the powder it self, and whisk).

Ingredients

200 ml water
100 g butter
120 g AP flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp sugar
3-4 large eggs 3 if you’d like your cream puffs taller, but since I needed a lot to make tower, I used 4 eggs and made 33 cream puffs

Instructions

Bring water to boil, add in salt and sugar plus the butter, stir to melt completely
Once your butter dissolved, turn heat to low and add in flour. Stir in quick motion as mixture will be thickened as shown on the picture. Take off from heat.
Once dough is off heat, let cool for 8-10 minutes, until warm to the touch. Then using electric mixer, mix in the egg, one egg at a time.
Place dough (or batter it became) into a piping bag with any tip you prefer, star or even round. You can even drop it by tablespoon (depending the size you wish to make). If you are good in piping, as in making the size equally big, by all mean, pipe away, onto a greased sheet. If not, you can pipe batter onto muffin tins, so they would bake the same size each time. Don’t forget to grease the muffin tins as well. Bake in 395 F for 25 minutes. During baking time, do not, I repeat, DO NOT open the oven door whatsoever, or they will collapse once taken out of the oven.
Once cooked, take out of oven, and onto the cooling rack they go.

For stacking the puffs, I used melted chocolate to glue each of them, to stay intact nicely.

For the 33 puffs, I used about 180 g milk chocolate chip and just slightly more than 2 tbsp of butter. Heat in 30 seconds intervals in microwave, stir to melt.

For this tower, I used 7 puffs as the base.You need to make a cut on each puff to fill them. Spoon or pipe the pudding in each center, and pipe tiny bit on the serving plate so the base puffs don’t move away while stacking. Once the base is ready, pour a tablespoon each of melted chocolate on top of them. Repeat steps until all puffs filled and stacked.

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