The Millefeuille Industrial Complex

Stéphane Bureaux believes that good design can amplify the social dimension of food. “When I design a cake, I think about how it will be constructed, but also how it will be deconstructed at the table, and how serving it and eating it can actively involve people.” Part of the intrigue of his Jean Prouvé cake comes from the floating, perforated chocolate roof. Do you cut into it along with the rest of the cake? Do you break it up and hand it around? The guessing game is part of the shared experience.

“I always start with the tastes and textures I want in a dessert and the design naturally follows,” said pastry chef Philippe Conticini. “It’s never the other way around.” Conticini likes to talk of an “architecture of taste,” a phrase he coined to describe the vertically layered desserts he serves in cocktail glasses. Last year, he collaborated with Philippe Chiambaretta, a designer who worked on the new Shiseido building in Tokyo, on the remake of a dessert classic, the bûche de Noël, or Yule log. Their “Bûche B” was a high-tech-fantasy version of the traditional chocolate sponge roll.

“Philippe wanted to do a bûche with different textures mixed together – crunchy, soft, and liquid – so we had to design a self-contained cake that would keep the liquid part from running all over the place,” said Chiambaretta. “I wanted the cake to have a manufactured quality, so I began to think about things that you eat that come in standardized, industrial shapes. I hit on the idea of medicine, and began working with the idea of capsules.”

Chiambaretta designed the shape using 3ds max, a three-dimensional design program. A machine-cut resin cast was used to make plastic, capsule-shaped moulds for a cake containing white chocolate mousse and apricot-and-basil chutney in a sleek capsule of white chocolate; the “Bûche B” is quite possibly one of the most aerodynamic desserts yet conceived. It is also reported to be delicious.

That quality, alas, was the missing ingredient in Stéphane Marchal’s kitchen, where the Jean Prouvé cake sat forlornly on the counter, beautiful but dry. A mousse filling would make it more moist, but Marchal thought it would be too ordinary and Bureaux feared it would make for a soggy interior. Bureaux mused about replacing the millefeuille with layers of Belgian waffles, an idea that Marchal dismissed out of hand. The afternoon work session was starting to look like a flop, when Bureaux suddenly hit on an idea. “We’ll drill holes into the cake and fill them with crème anglaise,” he said. Marchal nodded; he suggested raspberry- or vanilla-flavoured custard sauce. “We’ll drill the holes into each piece of cake,” enthused Bureaux, “and if people follow the dotted lines on top of the cake, they won’t cut into the holes, so the custard won’t run. It’ll be like a little surprise when you bite into the cake.”

There was a moment of subdued elation. Bureaux and Marchal still had to create a tripod mould, figure out a hole-punching system for the perforations, test Bureaux’s drilling idea, and settle on the crème anglaise flavour, but the conceptual part, at least, was done. The rest – with any luck – would be a piece of cake.