Crème Brûlée Layer Cake

Desserts as cakes part 3

I’m on a mission to cakeify all of my favourite desserts, now that tiramisu and sticky toffee are ticked off I thought I should try something that might present a bit more of a challenge. The flavours of crème brûlée are quite straight forward, we’ve got rich vanilla custard and caramelised sugar, in theory these are flavours that should be pretty easy to transfer over to a cake but what makes crème brûlée so good is that crunchy burnt sugar topping. So I set out to make a cake that had that burnt sugar crunch, silky custard filling and caramelised flavour.

What I hoped to achieve when making this cake was a cake that you ate and instantly thought “this is a crème brûlée cake” but this is harder than you might think, when working with flavours like vanilla and caramel, there are a million desserts that use these flavours and I didn’t want to just make a caramel cake. As well as this I needed this cake to fit into some other criteria, I’m thinking of adding this flavour to my wedding cake menu which meant the cake needed to be sturdy enough to build with and most importantly I wanted to make sure that any crunchy element would stay crunchy for DAYS, wedding cakes need to be built in advance to allow enough time for each component to properly set and often leftover cake is packed away to be enjoyed by family later so I needed it to be reliably crunchy.