A bloody great cake, Lawrence, Ivy and Jo, on the big day – 19 December 2010.

The cake itself was based on my old fave recipe, Mollie Katzen’s Cardamon coffee cake, which I’ve used for previous wedding cakes. I’ve continued to tweak the recipe (for example, reducing the butter in my metric conversion slightly), and in this cake we did alternating layers – chocolate and cinnamon, with a layer of nuts and plain choc in the actual sponge; vanilla and cardamon, with a layer of nutes and white chocolate in the sponge.

The whole lot was covered in plain choc ganache (I made 3.5kg of the stuff… didn’t need it all!), and decorated with chocolate leaves (plain and white), madewith bay leaves from the garden, as well as sugar paste ivy leaves (all made by Fran). The ivy around the bottom is silk.

Well, here’s the finished croquembouche, made for the wedding of our friends Sara and Mike.

Can’t really do a pic in portrait format as it’s 480mm (19 inches) tall!

Used Delia Smith’s choux bun recipe, but the rest is from The Roux Brothers on Patisserie – the nougatine base made by Fran, the filling for the buns (Crème pâtissière combined with whipped cream), the hard crack sugar (heated to 160C – a few burned finger tips) to glue it all together. I’m not sure whether the Roux version is just one layer of buns thick, but this one was made by filling the croquembouche mould with buns completely, so there would be enough for the 100 people at the wedding.

I made a second, three-tier cardamon cake for the wedding too. I’ve done a more comprehensive blog entry for the whole business over here.

Quite an undertaking!

Been asked to make a  croquembouche – basically a cone of choux buns filled with confectioner’s custard and cream all glued together with sugar syrup – for the wedding of some friends. Never made one before, so I’ve been experimenting.

This is a somewhat wonky mini one, about one sixth of size of the finished one I’m doing (bought a 19 inch/480mm mould for the job). The challenge isn’t just to perfect the choux and the glue, but also how the heck we’re going to get it across London. Could conceivably assemble it at the venue, but I’m not sure I entirely fancy heating sugar to 160C in an unfamiliar kitchen.