This Flower Pot Is Actually A Cake
When pastry chef Alicia Frick wanted to add a fun dessert to the menu, she never imagined it'd take on a life of its own. She envisioned a nod to the massive bouquets that cover every corner of the restaurant, Jardin, at The Wynn in Las Vegas, creating an upscaled riff on worms and dirt. The end result - Jardin Signature "Fleur," a flower pot cake - was so unbelievably realistic that it became a full-blown obsession.
Before long, people were flocking to the restaurant, brandishing their cell phones to hosts and servers, all requesting that cake. "I thought, 'I need more cakes!'" Frick laughed. She upped production from baking roughly 75 cakes a week in Jardin's downstairs kitchen to 150. For big conventions, like the Consumer Electronics Show in January - where 184,000 people flock to the Las Vegas strip for four days only - Frick's team boosts production to 300 a week. But they're not sweating it.
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"It's not one of those desserts where there's so many steps to make it," Frick explained. "We make a lot, but there's really only three components to it."
At this point, the Jardin team has figured out an assembly line of sorts, where nine people can work together to bang out 150 cakes in roughly an hour, she said.
The cake itself is surprisingly moist. It's a spongy, decadent chocolate base, enlivened with layers of chocolate mousse and raspberry jam. The whole thing's served in a chocolate flower pot, airbrushed using orange-tinted cocoa butter, and topped with crushed chocolate cookies and real flowers.
Demand has been so strong that the restaurant's dabbled with two other sizes - cupcakes for private parties, as well as a short-lived XXL size, which proved to gigantic for most people to conquer, let alone order. These days, they're sticking with the classic. It hasn't failed them yet, and if the swarm of people at the hostess stand on a random Wednesday afternoon is any indication, it won't any time soon.
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