12 Croquembouche Wedding Cakes We Love

Long gone are the days of only having one option for a wedding dessert! While the traditional tiered white wedding cake is still a lovely choice, there are many other ways to branch out and offer different sweets on a wedding dessert table. Pies, cupcakes, and even full candy bars have been popular options, but there’s another out-of-the-box alternative we'd like to recommend: croquembouche.

Croquembouche is a French dessert made from choux puff pastry, a super-delicate pastry dough. Each pastry puff is filled, most commonly with crème pâtissière, and then stacked in a cone shape. To help this confection stand tall, a drizzle of caramel is added to hold it together. 

Serving Croquembouche at a Wedding

Croquembouche definitely offers a unique alternative to a wedding cake, and that’s entirely the point. “Most couples who come to me requesting a croquembouche want something different for their wedding,” says Isabelle Boizis, owner of Zaza Marcelle Cake Design in England. “A croquembouche doesn’t last as long on display as a wedding cake—in France, it is traditionally brought out only at the time of dessert. Unlike a wedding cake, guests won’t have hours to admire it because it gets cut right away, so the main focus here is the taste—and it tastes absolutely delicious!”

While croquembouche may seem like a new addition to weddings, this traditional French pastry has been around for hundreds of years. Created by Antonin Carême, the dessert was originally made up of fruits, nuts, and chestnuts stacked together with caramel. "It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that the fruits and nuts were replaced with choux puffs to create the croquembouche as we know it today," says Boizis. And with a story with such a rich history, this might just be the perfect dessert to honor French heritage or to display at a European venue. 

While caramel is traditionally added to the mix to serve as the glue to hold this stacked dessert together, other flavors, colors, and decorations can be easily incorporated. “I personally love to glaze my small croquembouches with baker’s fondant. This way all the color palettes can be done—but for large pieces, there is nothing like a beautifully caramelized croquembouche,” says Boizis. “It can then be adorned with fresh flowers, sugar flowers, or sugar crystals.”

According to Boizis, each wedding guest will typically have three choux pastry buns from the croquembouche, so it’s common to offer a variety of flavors with the fillings. The most common filling? Crème pâtissière is a thicker custard-like pastry cream that can be altered to offer flavors such as vanilla, chocolate, coffee, raspberry, or lemon.

There are so many options to customize this unique dessert to your wedding theme and color palette. Read on for 12 ideas to inspire your own.