Baroque Bistro master pâtissier Jean-Michel Raynaud has recreated William & Kate’s extravagant royal wedding cake in just 48 hours.

After receiving pictures of the cake early on Saturday, Raynaud worked around the clock in Baroque’s patisserie kitchen with a team of three to recreate the royal’s decadent affair by Monday morning. The original cake, which featured over 17 different flower designs, 900 individually iced flowers and eight tiers, took the original cake maker Fiona Cairns and her extensive team five weeks to complete at an estimated cost of AU$80,000. Raynaud’s cake mimicked each of these elaborate icing flowers and buds, with each of these painstakingly hand moulded petal-by-petal and positioned on the cake. Other intricate details were also incorporated, much of which used the complicated ‘Lambeth’ piping technique to create the 3-dimensional scrollwork and flowers.

French Patissier Raynaud, former head chef of 3-Michelin starred Le Petit Nice, found the time frame to be the biggest challenge in the cake recreation.

“We knew that we had to work quickly, which was especially difficult seeing as many of the fine, delicate details of the cakes decoration would usually take weeks. The flowers were definitely the most time consuming aspect of the recreation, as many of them – such as the acorn and the thistle – we were making for the first time,” he said.

The only significant difference in Raynaud’s cake was the dropping of the bottom tier, although the cake is still sufficient in size to serve over 1200 people. Raynaud estimates a cake like the one he created would cost around $8000 – $10,000.

The cake will be on display at Baroque Bistro, at 88 George Street in The Rocks, for the next few weeks – don’t miss out on the opportunity to see it for yourself.