By Brooke Bobb, Vogue
Behind the scenes at New York’s Lafayette café and bakery, Jennifer Yee
whips up delightful French pastries that are timeless with a twist:
gorgeous éclairs topped with flower petals and tarts with undulating,
artfully sculpted meringue. Yee, a Food & Wine
Best New Pastry Chef, takes the same whimsical approach to wedding
cakes. Though she does create stunning takes on the multitiered white
icing variety, her unconventional offerings—some that leave out the cake
entirely—are particularly memorable. Yee will often create tiered
“cake” displays out of macarons, éclairs, and cannelés. “Some pastries
stack better than others,” she explains. “Small brownies, Belgian
Liège-style waffles, and double-crust pies all have a sturdiness to them
and are great for stacking on their own. If you have a more delicate
pastry, like an éclair or fruit tart, it’s best to find or create a
tiered display stand for them to sit on.”
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“These
nontraditional wedding cakes speak to a bride and groom who aren’t
afraid to eschew the traditional and go with something outside of the
box,” she says. Replacing the piping and flower fondant with cannelés,
Yee shares the secrets behind one of her inventive wedding day sweets
that gives “cutting the cake” a whole new meaning.
Cannelés Wedding “Cake”
“The French celebrate weddings with a croquembouche—a
tower of caramelized cream puffs—and I think it’s time the cannelé
stood in the spotlight. We make miniature cannelés every day at
Lafayette, and they already have a sturdy build to them as individual
pastries, which makes it easy to arrange them on a cake stand or platter
and then stack them into a tower.”