Craft a Doll Sized Croquembouche

       A croquembouche is a French dessert consisting of choux pastry puffs piled into a cone and bound with threads of caramel. In Italy and France, it is often served at weddings, baptisms and first communions, but in North America it is served at fancy dinner parties, for weddings or to celebrate the New Year.

       To make our version of a doll sized croquembouche you will need the following supplies: Mod Podge, cotton balls, old cardboard, a recycled bottle cap for the desert stand, masking tape, acrylic paints: yellow, gold, rust and black, gold metallic thread, black felt and plenty of white school glue!

       First, you will need to cut a half circle from scrap cardboard and curl it into a cone shape. Use masking tape to hold it firmly in this shape. This will be the form you will use to attach the croquembouche so make sure that it is the height and width that you want for doll play. Our tower is four and a half inches tall including the stand, and about two inches wide. 

       Fit the cone's bottom inside of a recycled bottle cap and tape it securely on with the masking tape. I painted this cap black and glued a bit of black felt to the bottom after finishing the croquembouche to prevent it from scratching surfaces.

Left, the cotton croquembouche rolls are glued to the cardboard cone shape.
Center the croquembouche are painted. Right, the faux caramelized
 sugar is "spun" around the toy croquembouche.

       Unravel the cotton balls until you have a large stack of cotton to work with. Roll dozens of small balls between your finger tips with white school glue to make the small croquembouche. The size of your doll's desert tower will determine just how many of these you will need. Our small rolls measured approximately half an inch in size and we made about 100 of these for our tower. It took about an hour to make the structure. I glued each roll, side by side down and around the tower using white school glue and let it dry over night before painting it. I did not glue the cotton rolls to the cap stand; I only let the bottom row of the rolls just hang over the rim of the cap slightly.

       Paint on a heavy coat of pale yellow acrylic paint to the croquembouche to begin with. Then using a dry brush, apply a second random coat of gold color; then a random coating of rusty brown color. You should be able to see all three colors in a variety of places on the croquembouche. Let the cotton batting tower dry thoroughly before applying the finishing coat of Mod Podge, followed by the coating of black for the stand. You may choose to paint the stand in an alternative color. I used black to match the black serving dishes we use already for our doll's New Year's Day play set.

       Finally, I applied a finishing coat of Mod Podge over the cotton croquembouche in order to make the surface sticky. Wrap a fine thin layer of metallic gold colored thread to imitate the spun sugar used in decorating real croquembouche. The finer the tread, the more convincing the faux spun sugar will look!

 

Here you can see the doll sized croquembouche between the charcuterie boards we made for
our doll's New Year's Party.