Celebrity Chefs Create 10 Luscious Cakes

Quick: Name one other food that arrives at the table with the pomp and spectacle of a birthday cake. Even the most modest stack of frosted layers is loaded with as much symbolism as it is sugar and butter.

Yet for all its significance, this sweet tradition is surprisingly young. The cake as we know it and the rituals surrounding it have 19th-century American roots, for it was in this nation's domestic kitchens that home cooks started baking celebratory cakes for family and crowning them with candles. In Europe, name days, saint's days, and even birthdays had long been celebrated—but only by the upper classes, and typically with sweets made by experts. As for that ubiquitous song, "Happy Birthday to You" debuted a mere hundred years ago.

Which is why (with all due respect to the geniuses who made the confections on these pages) we are fans of the homemade birthday cake. Because even if the icing melts or the middle slumps, it's a testament to a baker's affection, and to her willingness to devote time and care (and not just money) to making someone else happy.

If you are inspired to re-create one of these cakes, it's okay to cut yourself a wee bit of slack. Make just two of Christina Tosi's three fillings for her rich and fudgy banana cake, perhaps, or serve David Guas's gâteau de bayou without the meringue.

Not that you should skimp on everything. "Always use the best ingredients you can find," says illustrious cake baker Sylvia Weinstock. "And follow the recipes exactly." When a recipe calls for room-temperature eggs, for example, they really need to be at room temperature.

As for decorating, pastry chefs are as perfectionistic and nimble-fingered as surgeons. You can aim equally high, or just pipe on a wiggly border. It's all good. Once you set a match to the candles, dim the lights, and start singing your heart out, your cake will look spectacular—especially when you see it reflected in the eyes of the person you created it for.

—Celia Barbour

See the cakes!

Refined nostalgia is what draws customers to Baked, a pair of rustic-chic bakeries owned by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito in Brooklyn, New York, and Charleston, South Carolina. The duo use pastry-chef techniques and high-quality ingredients in their old-fashioned American desserts, punching up flavors and intensifying textures. For O's big day, they made the Aunt Sassy, a pistachio cake with honey buttercream. "It's absolutely a favorite among customers," says Lewis.

Get the recipe: Baked's Pistachio Cake with Honey Buttercream

Plus: Matt Lewis's most nerve-wracking kitchen experience

"I wanted to celebrate the actual magazines," says Buddy Valastro, star of TLC's reality show Cake Boss, when asked about his cake, a trompe l'oeil tower of his favorite issues of O, The Oprah Magazine. "I wanted the cake to be whimsical, so I stacked the cake issues at an offset angle," says Valastro, a fourth-generation baker from Hoboken, New Jersey. "The result is crazy and fun." It's also delicious—layers of red velvet cake with classic cream cheese frosting, a beloved combination that appealed to everyone on staff who tasted it.

Get the recipe: Buddy Valastro's Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Plus: Buddy Valastro's favorite childhood birthday cake

When Gina DePalma was growing up and her large extended Italian family gathered for holidays, they ended every meal with a platter piled high with fresh fruits and nuts. "It was a ritual," she says. No wonder, then, that the confection DePalma dreamed up for O pays homage to the flavors of her childhood. Her toasted-almond cake is layered with a rich mascarpone filling studded with amarena cherries. "Amarenas are wild Italian cherries with a unique flavor that is both sweet and slightly sour," explains DePalma, pastry chef at Mario Batali's Babbo restaurant in New York City and 2009 winner of the James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef award.

Get the recipe: Gina DePalma's Toasted Almond Cake with Mascarpone Cream and Amarena Cherries

Plus: Gina DePalma's favorite kitchen trick

"We were inspired by Oprah herself," says Ron Ben-Israel of his vision for the lavish three-tier tower adorned with handmade sugar-paste flowers, which also appears on this month's cover. "She's very generous, and we wanted to capture that feeling. The cake is overflowing; it's feminine and romantic, and it's like giving Oprah a gift." Ben-Israel, the only visiting master pastry instructor at the French Culinary Institute in New York City and the owner of Ron Ben-Israel Cakes, says, "Our philosophy is that our cakes must taste as good as they look." This one measures up, with four vanilla cake layers alternating with fillings of pistachio and apricot buttercreams, in springlike shades of pale green and peach.

Get the recipe: Ron Ben-Israel's Vanilla Cake with Pistachio and Apricot Buttercreams

Plus: Ron Ben-Israel's guilty pleasure

As a child, Bill Yosses loved devouring the sweets his mother baked. These days Yosses, the White House pastry chef, creates both everyday sweets for the First Family and elaborate desserts served at state dinners. For O he made a Black Forest cake in a chocolate box, "a very modern dessert with classic underpinnings—dark chocolate cake, cherries, whipped cream," he says. He swapped in some whole grain pastry flour and used omega-3-rich almond oil instead of butter, explaining, "I often make healthy substitutions now because I'm taking care of the Obama family." He also subtly tinkered with the cake's traditional taste, adding honey from the White House garden, plus lemon zest. "I like giving people flavors that transport them out of the present," he says.

Get the recipe: Bill Yosses' Black Forest Cake

Plus: Next: Bill Yosses's favorite secret ingredient

"This cake is like the best gingerbread you've ever had," says David Guas of his gâteau de bayou, his version of a traditional spice cake from the Acadian region of his native Louisiana. Guas's recipe includes nontraditional ingredients like black pepper, fresh ginger root steeped in boiling water, and hot sauce, which "adds a little acidity as well as heat." After it is baked, the cake is soaked in Steens pure cane syrup—which tastes like a mild, smooth cousin to molasses—and then topped with a burnt-sugar meringue, browned with a blow-torch for a toasted-marshmallow effect.

Get the recipe: David Guas's Gâteau de Bayou with Toasted Salty Caramel Meringue

Plus: David Guas's expert tip on making this cake

Pastry chef Christina Tosi oversees the desserts at David Chang's four Momofuku restaurants in New York City, all as hip as they are gastronomically revered. She also has her own bake shop, Momofuku Milk Bar, whose original location is a magnet for downtowners with late-night cravings. Tosi, whose influences range from the French Culinary Institute to Dairy Queen, likes to combine intense, well-balanced flavors and textures in her desserts. For us she baked up a supermoist banana cake, then added four distinctive fillings and toppings—banana cream, hazelnut crunch, chocolate hazelnut ganache, and hazelnut frosting. The effect is "creamy, crunchy, fudgy," says Tosi, with "flavors that are very in-your-face and delicious."

Get the recipe: Christina Tosi's Banana Cake

Plus: Christina Tosi's favorite secret ingredient

When asked how she got into baking, Mindy Segal grins. "I'll be honest with you," she says. "Between the ages of 12 and 14, I was grounded every weekend." She needed an outlet for her energy, and found it in the kitchen. Segal now has her own restaurant–dessert bar in Chicago called HotChocolate, and has been a nominee for the James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef award for each of the past three years. The treat she created for O has elements of the best-sellers at her shop—tiny chocolate cupcakes with scooped-out centers lined with chocolate shells that are filled with liquid butterscotch, topped with milk chocolate buttercream, and decorated with toffee pieces and other miniature confections. "I wanted to create a pastry sensation in a cupcake," says Segal. "You put it in your mouth, the chocolate shell pops, and the smooth cream flows out."

Get the recipe: Mindy Segal's Milk Chocolate and Milk Stout Cupcakes

Plus: Mindy Segal's favorite thing to make

No mere whim prompted Sylvia Weinstock to top her angel food cake with an explosion of sugar daffodils. "Daffodils are the 10th-anniversary flower," says the meticulous sugar artist. "And yellow is one of my happy colors." Weinstock iced the layers with lime, coconut, and blood orange buttercreams—"flavors that sing out to you," she says. The New York City–based Weinstock, a former kindergarten teacher, was dubbed "the Leonardo da Vinci of wedding cakes" by Bon Appétit magazine and counts Ivanka Trump, Sean "Diddy" Combs, and Jennifer Lopez among her clients.

Get the recipe: Sylvia Weinstock's Angel Food Cake with Lime, Coconut, and Blood Orange Buttercreams

Plus: Sylvia Weinstock's favorite people to cook for

Elisabeth Prueitt, James Beard Award–winning pastry chef and co-owner of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, created a lemon cake filled with layers of caramel, lemon cream, and lemon-grapefruit curd, all topped off with a jumble of hand-spun-sugar flowers. "I spent many summers at the beach as a kid drinking lemonade, and those memories, so bright and warm, are evoked in this cake," says Prueitt.

Get the recipe: Elisabeth Prueitt's Lemon Cake

Plus: Elizabeth Prueitt's favorite kitchen trick

And before you start: 5 tips from our celebrity chefs on baking the perfect cake