Tiers of joy: The Belfast baker elevating cake to an art form

There’s a framed photograph of a blond child, beaming with pride, beside a birthday cake in the shape of a bear, on the wall in Nicole Crowe’s cake studio and tasting room, on the outskirts of Belfast. This is the purpose-built space where the pastry chef, who is also head pastry chef at Michelin-starred Ox restaurant in Belfast, creates extraordinary special occasion and wedding cakes that take around three days to make and cost an average of £750.

It’s a stunning space, with dedicated areas for baking, decorating, storage, meetings with clients and a work desk. It was built on the grounds of the former family home of her husband, James Crowe, where the couple now live. “It was supposed to take five months to build, but because of Brexit and Covid it took a year,” she says in an accent that reveals her origins in the US, overlaid with Belfast.

There’s a handwritten recipe for “Yellow Cake” attached to the photograph; a simple amalgam of butter, sugar, eggs, flour, milk, vanilla and salt. This was the first cake Crowe made by herself (well, with a little help from her aunt), aged five, in her hometown in Arizona. There are other clues to her profession dotted around the pristine studio. A child’s wooden rolling pin sits in a display case, and a shiny red food mixer that Crowe got when she was 18, and still uses, has pride of place on a counter.

[ Aoife Noonan baking recipes ]

Fast-forward 13 years from that first cake-making session, and Crowe was a culinary graduate who defied the norm in her college by going straight into the pastry section, bypassing the hot kitchen. “They told me that you couldn’t get a pastry job right away – you have to work your way through the kitchen to get on pastry. Luckily that wasn’t the case for me. It was very fortunate. But I was also very stubborn.”

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Working 100-plus hours a week in a fine-dining restaurant in Scottsdale, which she describes as “the culinary capital of Arizona”, was followed by a job at Tammie Coe Cakes, a specialist bakery, where her interest in special occasion cakes, including the so-called sculpted ones, made to resemble any specific object requested by the customer, was piqued. “I was just obsessed when I saw her work. I was like, I need to know how to do that. It took me a while to become her assistant pastry chef and actually get my hands on the decorating part.”

Her next job, at fine-dining restaurant Orange Sky Restaurant at Talking Stick Resort and Casino, led to a chance meeting that was to shape the rest of her life. It was there that she met Belfast chef Stevie Toman, who now runs Ox in the city’s Oxford Street along with Alain Kerloc’h.

With a desire to see more of the world and expand her pastry skills, she set off for Europe, stopping off first in Belfast to reconnect with Toman. “Stevie picked me up at the airport. And I went straight into the restaurant to have the tasting menu.” But visa restrictions prevented her from working, or even volunteering, at the restaurant. The 2014 trip was not all in vain, however. “I ended up meeting my husband, James, when I was just out and about in Belfast one day, at Bert’s Jazz Bar at the Merchant [hotel].

She returned home to the US when her money ran out and her travels around Europe were completed. “And then my husband proposed to me, and I moved back very quickly. We were married within five months, and then I started in Ox right away, in May 2016.” The restaurant had already earned a Michelin star at this stage, so she stepped right into the world of intricate pre-desserts, desserts, monthly changing menus, and bread baking.

“There were a lot of differences because I had never worked in a Michelin-star restaurant. The number of components per plate was shocking. And I loved it. It was just so delicate and intricate compared to things I had previously done.”

She found differences, too, in the customer expectations of what a fine-dining dessert should look like. “Americans like really straightforward stuff. Over here people are looking for things to be excited by. I was always pushed in restaurants in the US to do the classics – soufflés and pithiviers and stuff like that. I had a chef [in the US] that tried to push the boundaries, but those desserts didn’t sell quite as well. He was doing things like tempering chocolate, making his own elderflower caviar and things like that, but they didn’t go like the soufflé.”

I believe every cake should have a filling. Since I opened the business, I’ve only made two cakes with buttercream at the centre, because I highly discourage them

Now, Crowe, who is expecting a baby later this year, combines her own business – Cakes By Nicole – with a modified role at the restaurant, though she is still head pastry chef. “I am on a part-time schedule now, where I go in and create [desserts] with Stevie, change the menu and train the staff on it. And then if needed, I’ll work an extra day or two. If I don’t have many cakes on, I might just work more in the restaurant. But that’s been very rare.”

Crowe is determined that her cakes must taste as good as they look, and that process begins with a tasting session at her studio, where clients are treated to a mix-and-match session with her range of light and airy sponges and fillings, usually home-made seasonal fruit curds or jams, and delicate mousses, rather than buttercream, which she uses on the exterior. “I believe every cake should have a filling. Since I opened the business, I’ve only made two cakes with buttercream at the centre, because I highly discourage them. One was really intensely sculpted – it was a crescent moon – so I was okay with that because it was a structural need, and the other was for a one-year-old’s birthday.”

The tasting sessions usually last about 45 minutes, though she had one couple stay for two hours, not because they weren’t in agreement about what they wanted, but because they were enjoying the cakes so much. Although some clients opt for one flavour throughout their cake, most request a mixture. “Usually, after the tasting, people say, ‘Can I have four?’ But the top tier is small, so I encourage them to combine the top two, and pick their three favourites.”

Her cakes are utterly delicious, and designed to be eaten as a dessert, and this is something she would like to see adopted here. “I would like to change the way people view their wedding cake in Ireland. In the US every girl dreams about their cake – it is a centrepiece to the day. We don’t have dessert at weddings; the cake is the dessert. I would like to bring that concept to life here – that is why I embrace the fillings and textures in cakes, making them an all-round dessert.”

For her own very pretty, traditional circular wedding cake with lots of intricate piping detail, which she was working on until 2am on the day of the ceremony, Crowe opted for “chocolate cake with vanilla bean mousse, blackberries and raspberries. And then I also had a vanilla sponge with lemon curd and fresh strawberries and raspberries.” But were she to do it again, the stunning, six-tier creation would look a lot different. “Every year on our anniversary, I think about what I would do differently for my wedding cake. It would probably be a lot more bold, and it would probably have different shapes in it, like if I could stack squares and rectangles and have lovely flowers and ferns coming off it. I would make it really untraditional.”

For the most part, however, Crowe finds that her clients want traditional round cakes, in several tiers. “A lot of people want just a plain white cake with very little detail and fresh flowers on it, and some people just want buttercream cakes, with texture. Like if you take your palette knife and spin and just let it kind of naturally fall; people are loving that at the moment.” She would love to see more variety in the cakes that she is asked to make for weddings. “I just like to be challenged with designs and would like to see some more boldness.”

It’s not all about how the cakes look, however. “I have no freezer, because I believe that everything should be fresh. You can taste the difference and you can certainly feel the difference in the textures. I really love light cake. I don’t know if it’s American recipes, but they’re a lot airier, and I find the cakes over here are butter-based and quite heavy sometimes.”

But isn’t Irish butter the best in the world, and why wouldn’t you want it in your cake? Crowe favours a lighter recipe for the sponges, and gets the dairy hit in with the buttercream icing. “My buttercream is an Italian meringue butter cream. It’s very light, sweet vanilla, and then a touch salty at the end. Almost all my recipes would have salt in them, just to bring a roundness to them.”

As well as wedding cakes, Crowe makes special occasion cakes in the sculpted or reality mode, as requested by clients, anything from two cans of Harp lager with a packet of Tayto crisps, to a startlingly accurate representation of a steak and chips dinner, complete with a bottle of Jaboulet Châteauneuf-du-Pape, a gift for her father-in-law, all made of cake, filled and iced, except the sprig of rosemary – “that was out of my garden”. This area of the business is where Crowe really gets to flex her creativity and avoid “making the same cake over and over again”.

Anything goes when it comes to these creations. Cars and boats are popular, and she has even made a cake to resemble a bowl of curry and a naan, faithfully executed, with chocolate cake and dark chocolate mousse on the inside. Takeaway coffee and a croissant? No problem. But be prepared for a surprise when you take a sip or bite in.

Cake creators

Clare Taylor

Clare Anne Taylor Couture Cakes

Clare Taylor has worked as a pastry chef in some of the UK’s top kitchens, including The Ritz and Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. In 2019 she set up her special occasion and wedding cake business, initially operating from her home kitchen, now based at Newtown Business and Enterprise Centre in Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow, where she heads a team of pastry chefs.

Her cakes are made with Irish butter and free-range eggs. She makes her own seasonal fruit conserves, compotes and curds, forages elderflower and grows her own lavender. As well as variations on sponge, she makes a chocolate biscuit cake. Potential clients can order a wedding cake tasting box, containing five cake samples chosen from a seasonal menu (€55, plus €10 for express delivery).

The trends Taylor predicts for wedding cakes lean towards a more informal style of cake. “Buttercream finish is going to be very popular for brides and grooms in 2023. It brings a more relaxed vibe and also lends itself well to the beautiful painted floral styles we have seen gaining popularity. We hand-make the sugar flowers to match our brides’ bouquets, and statement pieces to complete our cakes. There will always be a strong demand for timeless elegant styles, but there is definitely a growing demand for bolder, more adventurous statement cakes. clareannetaylor.ie

Agnieszka Krolikowska

Chef, Silver Stream Healthcare Leeson Park

Birthdays are special occasions at any stage in life, and at the Silver Stream Healthcare Group nursing home in Leeson Park, Dublin 6, Agnieszka Krolikowska makes sure that every passing year is celebrated in style. The chef, who came to Ireland from Poland 16 years ago, creates lavish, bespoke cakes for the nursing home residents, often reflecting their life experiences and interests in how they are decorated.

Having worked her way up from kitchen assistant to head chef at the nursing home, where she has worked since arriving in Ireland, she perfected her pastry skills by watching YouTube and Facebook videos, “and I am still learning”, she says. She makes a special cake for each of the 40-plus residents on their birthday, as well as baking and decorating themed cakes for all of the residents on Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Easter, Halloween and Christmas.

“They are really surprised when they see the cake; sometimes they cry,” she says of the reaction from the recipients. The cake is theirs to share with family and friends, and “sometimes the families take the rest of the cake home,” she says. Chocolate cake is a favourite, sometimes with toffee buttercream icing.