Caramelized Almond Croissant Cappuccino Layer Cake
apartment café's 1st birthday party: celebrating one whole year of apt cafe friends, food, almond croissants, and parchment paper
Ryan Nordheimer•
January 24, 2026
Back in January of last year, I was talking to my friend Christine about what we could do as some sort of content series. Ideally one that would give us a creative outlet to put on an in-person event. We had just hosted our first Cookbook Banquet the previous month, which was an 100-person cookbook club extravaganza with Justine Doiron. It was completely insane and surreal but left us without any energy for about 2 weeks after and involved me storing 30 boxes of crap/supplies in my living room. I remember shepherding this one dolly stacked tall of those boxes over and over again (somehow defying gravity), bringing the never-ending supplies up from the street level and into our venue. I had to guilt my parents the day before into driving up from Maryland to help me put on the show. Somehow everything went off without a hitch (there was like a 99% chance it wouldn’t). Even with the incredible euphoria, I knew that I couldn’t do that again, or at least regularly.
Then Christine had showed me this one video by vic lauren of her at home café, tricked out with a coffee bar, from scratch coffee syrups, and a variety of curated baked goods. We felt like there was something there. An opportunity to create a new event, just in my apartment for our close food friends. We came up with the mental mood board pretty quickly.
1) We wanted it to be a potluck, where each of our friends would bring something homemade and inventive, inspired by the cookbook clubs we had been going to. 2) We would lay out the food in one big sprawl on my kitchen counter on a parchment paper roll, inspired by a bakery on the Lower East Side called Supermoon Bakehouse. 3) We wouldn’t really pay attention to the coffee bar at all. Just food. Store-bought coffee is just fine. 4) We would have a monthly theme.
And the rest was history. Our first apartment cafe went viral. This new model of potlucks captivated a year of internet foodies. I remember walking down the street in my neighborhood and running into someone from my high school class. She had told me she had even hosted an apartment cafe inspired by me. At the moment I realized, oh wow, my influence was a lot stronger than I thought.
The cafe moments got bigger: a latte art machine, a New York Times feature (which is now framed in my kitchen), an opportunity with Mastercard to host an apartment cafe pop-up with two dozen of my fans.
Christine and I kept hosting the cafes not just because the internet loved them, but because we also loved them. The opportunity to host a dozen of our food friends every month and eat the most incredible, inspiring, amazing food; hang out for hours chatting about our lives; enjoy a few moments of this beautiful spectacle. We were hooked.
I also loved the ability to feature regulars in addition to new creators each month (Mei Liao, Alex George aka LilyPCrumbs, CrustbyCarson, Paige Nickless, @irenechung.art, @sabbbern, Ben & Zikki, Danielle Sepsy, CAKE PICNIC, Keegan McManus, Halle Burns, Emerald Chan). Apologies if I left anyone out. There were a lot of you!
For our first cafe of January, 12 cafés later, it felt only appropriate to host apartment café’s 1st birthday party. Our own little infant child turning 1!! So special. And what better way to commemorate the birthday than by having everyone recreate their best bake from the past year. A challenge to push us to reinvent our past work.
Unfortunately, I had just recreated my 2 favorite items for my pop-up just a few weeks earlier (my lobster rolls and princess cake coupes). With those items out of the running, I looked back to Christine’s birthday cake I made for the bread & butter cafe. I thought it could be fun to do a visual interpretation of that cake yet change the recipe up. I decided to go with the flavor profile of one of my favorite pastries, the almond croissant. Croissants have been somewhat underloved at our cafes since they are so difficult to make. Honoring them in the layer cake felt like a much-deserved moment in the spotlight. My layers ended up being: almond sponge cakes, cappuccino diplomat creme, frangipane, caramelized croissants, and swiss buttercream. I also provided the recipe for the caramelized almond croissants on their own, which are incredibly addicting and (relatively) very easy to make. To garnish the cake, everyone got to put one of their items on top. A meta cake moment.
This is what everyone else brought:
- me: caramelized almond croissant layer cake, caramelized almond croissants
- Christine: chili oil foccacia with chive cream cheese (lunar new year cafe), apple fritter muffins (fall cafe)
- Erika: black sesame babka buns (fall cafe)
- Deepika Kalla-Paul: “corn blondie” zebra cakes (hamptons/nostalgia cafe)
- @arlynosborne: fluffernutter cookies (hamptons cafe)
- Zack: Dubai chocolate k’nefa bars (eid cafe)
- Allison Chen: pizza pockets croissants (nostalgia cafe)
- @dolcetta.baking: rainbow cookie cake slabs (italian cafe)
This theme had the ulterior motive of forcing people into remaking the items that we haven’t stopped craving since their initial feature. In a way, this plate was the most sentimental. A capstone of all of our achievements from the year. A marker of the friendships we’ve made and the sensation we created.
How I couldn’t do it without all of them.
For the love of apartment cafe,
Ryan
Hey! My name is Ryan Nordheimer. Welcome to my cooking and baking site. I’m a 25-year old home cook living in the East Village in New York City. Hopefully you enjoy my food through my own, tried-and-true recipes.
Ingredients (30)
Ingredients (30)
For the layer cakes
For the cappuccino diplomat creme
For the frangipane
For the assembly & buttercream
Instructions
For the layer cakes
Preheat oven to 350 °F with a rack in the upper and lower thirds. Lightly grease only the bottom of 2 half sheet pans. Line each with parchment paper and set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the egg yolks (8), oil (⅔ cup), water (⅔ cup), extracts (2 tsp), 2 cups of the sugar, and 1 tsp of the kosher salt.
Then sprinkle over the baking powder (2 Tbsp) and all-purpose flour (2 ⅓ cups) and using a spatula mix together until 90% combined. Set aside.
In another large bowl, add the eggs whites (8) and the remaining kosher salt. Using an electric hand mixer, start mixing the egg whites on medium-high speed.
Once they are very foamy, start streaming in the remaining ½ cup of sugar. Continue whisking until the egg whites hold soft peaks.
Fold 1/3 of the egg whites into the cake batter until just combined. Then repeat with another 1/3, then the final third of egg whites. Equally divide the cake batter into the 3 prepared quarter sheet pans (try your best to be equal). Smooth out with an offset spatula.
Bake the cakes with 2 pans in the lower rack and 1 in the upper rack for 15 minutes.
Then carefully switch the sheets and continue baking until the cakes are golden, feel firm when you press on their centers, and a toothpick comes out clean, another 5 minutes.
Let the cakes cool until warm. Then take a paring knife and run it around the perimeter of the pans to release the cake from the sides. Cakes can last covered with plastic at room temperature for 1-2 days.
For the cappuccino mousse
In a medium saucepan, add the sugar (¾ cup), cornstarch (3 Tbsp), and salt (½ tsp). Whisk to combine. Whisk in the egg yolks (4), and then slowly whisk in the milk (1 ⅓ cups).
Place saucepan over medium-high heat. Whisk constantly until the mixture starts to thicken, 5-7 minutes, then reduce heat to medium-low and continue cooking until the mixture turns very thick.
Dump into a bowl, stir in the instant coffee (2 Tbsp), and cover with plastic wrap until completely cold.
Sprinkle gelatin (1 Tbsp) over 4 Tbsp of cold water. Allow to sit for 5 minutes.
Then add to a small saucepan and melt over lowest flame until just melted. Pour over the chilled pastry cream and whisk to combine. Set aside.
In a separate large bowl, whip the heavy cream (2 cups) until medium peaks form. Whisk 1/3 of the cream into the coffee mixture to loosen it. Then fold in the remaining whipped cream in two additions. Cover with plastic and refrigerate until ready to use, up to 3 days.
For the frangipane
Add all the ingredients to a large sautepan. Set over medium heat and stir with a rubber spatula until the mixture is completely combined, glossy, and has reached a temperature of at least 160 °F on a cooking thermometer, 10 to 15 minutes.
Dump into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until cold, up to 5 days in advance.
For the assembly
Line a 9in Springform pan with plastic wrap, then line with an acetate cake collar. Set aside.
Turn out one of the cake sheets onto a parchment-lined cutting board. Use a 9in. cake round to trace 2 circles (one will be about 80% complete, that’s fine). Take the complete round and place it into the cake pan. Scoop 1 ½ cups of the cappuccino mousse over top. Use a spoon to spread into a somewhat layer, making the edges just higher than the center of the mousse. Transfer the frangipane to a piping bag and cut a 1/2” opening. Pipe a decent amount of the frangipane in a circle over the mousse, not going all the way to the edges. Take 1 of the caramelized croissants and crumble it up into pieces overtop this layer.
Take the other 80% cake round and place it overtop. Cut out a couple more pieces of cake to fill in the remaining gaps as flush as you can get it. Repeat this layering process.
Repeat this process again with the other cake sheet for a total of 3 filling layers. Make sure you end on the final complete cake round. So it should be a complete cake round on the top and bottom with the hodge-podge ones in the center. Cover with plastic and refrigerate for at least a few hours and up to 2 days.
For the Swiss meringue buttercream
Fill a medium saucepan with a couple inches of water and bring to a lively simmer over medium heat. Add the egg whites (1 ¼ cups) and sugar (3 cups) to a bowl of a stand mixer. Place over the water and whisk constantly until all the sugar dissolves and the mixture feels very warm to the touch, 4 to 6 minutes.
Attach the bowl to your stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Crank to high speed and let whisk until the meringue is stiff and glossy and the bowl no longer feels very warm, 8 to 10 minutes.
Dump all your butter (7 ⅓ sticks) in and mix on medium-high speed until your buttercream forms. Mix in the salt (1 pinch) and vanilla (2 tsp).
Remove your cake from the fridge. Unclasp the outer cake ring. Remove the acetate. Place a 9” cake round on top of the cake and flip the whole thing over carefully. Set onto a decorating stand. Remove the plastic wrap.
Give the cake a crumb coat of frosting, then chill for 15 minutes, then continue to frost and decorate how you wish. For the inset method, you can follow Kassie Mendieta’s method, which she details amazingly in one of her Substack articles.
Subscribe to get my new recipes delivered to your inbox
Comments
Sign in to comment
