For a big day
The ones you build over two days and carry to the table with both hands.
15 recipes
🇫🇷 FranceCroquembouche
The French wedding tower: cream-filled choux buns glued into a cone with hot caramel — 'crunch in the mouth'.
🇮🇹 ItalyCassata Siciliana
Palermo's Easter showpiece: sponge and green marzipan lining a mould of sweetened ricotta, glazed white and crowned with candied fruit.
🇺🇦 UkraineKyiv Cake
The 1956 Kyiv classic: two discs of crisp hazelnut meringue sandwiched with a cognac-scented custard buttercream, half of it turned chocolate.
🇸🇪 SwedenPrinsesstårta
Sweden's green-domed princess cake: sponge layered with raspberries, vanilla custard and a mountain of whipped cream under a sheet of marzipan.
🇫🇷 FranceFraisier
France's strawberry showpiece: halved strawberries pressed against the glass wall of the ring, packed with cream between two thin sponges.
🇫🇷 FranceOpéra Cake
Seven precise layers of almond sponge, coffee buttercream, and chocolate ganache.
🇫🇷 FranceSaint-Honoré Cake
A ring of caramel-dipped choux puffs on a puff pastry base, filled with airy Chiboust cream.
🇫🇷 FrancePithiviers
Two discs of puff pastry sealed around almond cream, scalloped at the edge and scored with curving rays from the centre.
🇫🇷 FranceBûche de Noël
The Christmas log: a génoise rolled hot in a towel, filled with dark chocolate buttercream and forked into bark.
🇭🇺 HungaryDobos Torte
Budapest's seven-layer sponge cake, filled with chocolate buttercream, crowned with hard caramel.
🇱🇹 LithuaniaŠakotis
Lithuania's 'tree cake', baked at home in a tube tin one thin layer at a time so the cut slice shows golden rings.
🇫🇷 FranceDacquoise
Nut meringue baked crisp, cut into slabs and stacked with ganache and hazelnut buttercream — the marjolaine.
🇫🇷 FranceMille-feuille
'A thousand leaves' of puff pastry layered with vanilla pastry cream.
🇫🇷 FranceParis-Brest
A ring of choux pastry, shaped like a wheel, filled with hazelnut praline mousseline.
🇩🇪 GermanyBaumkuchen
The 'king of cakes' — dozens of thin layers broiled one by one into a tree-ring pattern.