Photos: Maria McBride
Valentine's week finds everyone with a nose for chocolate making a trip to Jacques Torres Chocolate for his world-famous sweets. I, too, made a pilgrimage, spending an hour with Jacques in his hectic kitchen on Hudson Street in Manhattan—this week is one of the busiest of the year!—to watch him create a whimsical cake entirely of chocolate. To spend any time at all with Jacques is to know he is a man who loves to have fun—his exuberant spirit is perfectly expressed in his charming confections, as well as the spontaneous way he mixes elements and patterns to create a fresh, playful spin on the traditional wedding cake.
To make this confection, Jacques began with tiers of molded white chocolate, which served as the base; next, using a pastry bag filled with liquid chocolate (edible "glue"), he affixed handcrafted chocolate X's, O's, and hearts on each tier.
The final touch: cake toppers fashioned from a pair of molded-chocolate penguins. The female penguin is made of white chocolate; to make the groom, Jacques adds dark chocolate to create the tuxedo jacket. Once the birds have cooled, he uses chocolate to pipe on a jaunty bow tie and eyelashes, and places the pair, beaks kissing, on the top tier.
You can place an order with Jacques Torres Chocolate online, and browse more whimsical cake toppers in our Cake Gallery.
—Maria McBride