For the record, for the next time I make one of these little fuckers, though I can’t imagine when I’d feel magnanimous enough to do that again, here’s what we did:

4X Saveur mag pate a choux recipe: yielded about 210 1.5-inch puffs total
3X Saveur mag pastry cream recipe, and then oh duh, of course we ran out and had to make a fourth batch in the middle of everything on Sunday. Why can’t I just follow the recipe like a normal person? (I’m totally glossing over the one night I spent trying to short-cut on both items, and having to chuck everything.)

We spent a lot of time trying to sort out the math and the architecture, and then of course ended up just winging it, much to Karl’s horror, though he was nice enough to be quiet and just go buy sandwiches for those of us who could keep solid food down. The base circle was 14 or 15 puffs around, but we did another concentric circle inside just to strengthen the whole thing. Two more layers like that, with the same number of puffs. Then we started tapering in, and did only a single-wide circle. The whole thing was not quite two feet tall, I’d guess, and used about 180 or so of the puffs. Val’s expert eye saw where we needed to patch, and we used the tops of another four or five puffs to fill in some weird holes (I’m guessing that girl would be good at jigsaw puzzles too). It fed 55-ish people generously, even when you take into account Katie eating at least ten of the puffs all by herself.

For caramel, I went the route recommended on an egullet thread (which I’m too lazy to find now to link to, but there’s the site), using 8 oz. sugar, 12 liquid oz. water and 1/2 tsp of cream of tartar. It always took longer than I thought it would to caramelize (but watching the bubbles beforehand was a beautiful, hallucinogenic thing), but when it went it went–trick was to take it off the burner just as it turned light gold, and the color darkened as it sat. I probably did 6 or 7 batches of the caramel in three different pans on three burners, kept at different stages of readiness.

Oh, and we put honey, vamilla and almond extract in the pastry cream. Next time I’d cut down on the sugar a bit, because with the caramel coating and the extra honey, you’d eat one bite and feel like the veins in your temples were going to pop and all your teeth would fall out. So, yes, it turned out well.