Sebastien Blanc-Tailleur, a Parisian pastry chef, has always had a passion for sweets. “I’ve been obsessed with baking since I was a little boy,” he said. Since opening his eponymous business in 2015, Mr. Blanc-Tailleur has quietly become one of France’s most renowned wedding and special occasion cake makers.
“Pastry is my sweet form of madness,” she said with a smile. “But it comes from my family. My parents are collectors who love rare antiques, fine paintings, art and designs, so I am perpetuating the family tradition through confectionery.’
As well as making cakes and pastries, Mr Blanc-Tailleur, 32, has also become a serious collector of antique pastry books, particularly fond of those by 18th-century chef Antonin Carême on pastry moulds. “With their shapes and intricate details, pastry molds are a unique expression of France’s culinary history and artistic heritage,” said Mr Blanc-Tailleur.
“This guy has gold on his hands,” said Yannick Alléno, a three-star Michelin chef for whom Mr. Blanc-Tailleur had worked as sous-chef pâtissier at Ledoyen, a restaurant in Paris, in 2014. “He has an amazing humanitarian sensibility and may even be the reincarnation of Michelangelo,” said Mr. Aleno.
With a fierce determination to dominate the world of sugar, Mr. Blanc-Tailleur left home at 15 to become an apprentice to Christophe Turgot, a confectioner who had a patisserie in the seaside town of Villers-sur-Mer in Normandy. “My father resisted my plan at first, but he came around,” she said, adding, “It was very difficult. I lived alone and worked non-stop. But Mr. Turgot was kind and took me under his protection.’
He then moved to Toulouse, France, to take a job at Pillon, the city’s best-known quality patisserie. “I would work all day and then, because I had the key, I would spend hours and hours, even days, alone in the kitchen where the pastry decorations were being made teaching and experimenting,” he said.
Mr. Blanc-Tailleur’s persistence led him to create cakes for weddings and special events. “Creating a great wedding cake is about making one’s dreams come true so that there is a kind of shared communication with your wife, your family and your guests,” Mr Blanc-Tailleur said. “My job is to decipher the fantasies and desires of my customers and make them a cake that will delight them and make them proud.”
Mr. Blanc-Tailleur’s clientele includes French and European aristocrats, tycoons, movie stars and fashion designers — including Dior and the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. He has also worked with American clients, most recently creating a 10-tier purple cake with intricate licorice flowers for his wedding Misha Kordestani, founder and president of Guin Records, a music group based in Los Angeles, last May in Cannes, France. He also designed a lily-of-the-valley wedding cake for the five-day wedding extravaganza last November of Jacob LaGrone and Madelaine Brockway, a wealthy couple from Texas.
“Designing a wedding cake involves elements of being an architect, an art historian and a jewelery designer,” Mr Blanc-Tailleur said. “My work is like edible haute couture because every detail matters.”
Whatever the couple’s desires, if their tastes don’t match Mr. Blanc-Tailleur’s understated elegance, he may not take them on as a client. “Before I accept a commission, I meet with a potential client to tell them what they’re looking for and also try to understand their aesthetic,” he said. “There are times when I’ve had to turn down a client when it was clear to me that our tastes are incompatible.”
This does not mean, however, that he will deny every far-fetched request. He recently created a wedding cake that recreated the Duomo di Milano in Milan as an intricately detailed miniature.
Mr. Blanc-Tailleur’s mediums are flour, butter, cream and chocolate, among other ingredients, but mostly sugar. She uses pate à sucre, an edible dough made from confectioners’ sugar, egg whites and glucose, to sculpt the cakes’ elegant ornate details. This includes edible lace and gilded foliage, along with his signature fragile and stunningly vibrant flowers.
With a staff of seven in an atelier on the outskirts of Paris, she assembles the flowers one petal at a time, which is why a wedding cake can represent several months of work. Wedding cakes are usually ordered at least six months in advance, and given the huge amount of hands-on work that goes into each creation, she rarely produces more than 12 cakes a year.
The starting price for a Blanc-Tailleur wedding cake is 7,500 euros, or about $8,100, while simpler celebration cakes are relatively more affordable, starting at 3,400 euros, or about $3,700.
Blanc-Tailleur’s business has been awarded the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivent label, a prestigious French government label that indicates a business that continues to perpetuate traditional French art.
Mr Blanc-Tailleur said that while wedding cake trends change often, he is proud to keep the classic art of French pastry alive. His greatest pleasure is when a couple discovers that their wedding cake is not only beautiful but also tastes good.
“This is very important to me,” he said. “My cakes have to taste as good as they look. “The ultimate goal of my job as a pastry chef is always to create culinary delight.”