Château Bonnaventure
wedding cake
For a wedding in the quiet of Château Bonnaventure, I design a sugar paste cake to match its intimacy. Sculpted by hand in Paris, brought to you in person. I am Ange Gimenez.
A cake imagined
for Bonnaventure.
I am a Paris-based wedding cake designer specialising in hand-sculpted sugar paste. For couples marrying at Château Bonnaventure, I design a bespoke cake conceived for the room, the light, and the close-up intimacy of a smaller celebration.
Bonnaventure is the kind of venue couples reach through a planner or a quiet recommendation, not a hashtag. The setting asks for restraint rather than spectacle, which is exactly the brief I enjoy most. For a wedding here, I would build a cake that belongs to the spirit of the place: refined, honest, made to be looked at slowly.
My instinct for a venue of this scale is to let detail carry the piece. Large sculptural flowers read beautifully against stone and the soft daylight of a country reception room, so I would lean into an ivory, cream, and pale botanical palette. Nothing that competes with the architecture. Everything that flatters it.
Whatever the design, every sugar petal is shaped by hand over two to four weeks in Paris. The point is not only a cake that survives a warm afternoon. It is a cake that looks better in the last photograph of the night than in the first, because it was made for close attention.
I would deliver and place the cake at Bonnaventure myself. I work this way at every venue: I think first about how your guests experience the room as they walk in, then set the cake exactly so, with nothing rushed and nothing left to chance.
Why I work
in sugar paste
An intimate venue is unforgiving: the cake is seen from a few feet away, all evening. Sugar paste is what lets that closeness become an asset rather than a risk. Here is why, plainly.
Steady when the room warms
Country weddings open their doors to the garden and the late sun. Buttercream slides and pits as the air heats; sugar paste does not move. The cake you see at the first toast is the same cake your guests photograph at the last dance, edges crisp, surface clean, form intact.
Built to reward a close look
In a small room, every flower is examined. I shape each one by hand, petal by petal, never piped or printed. A single peony can take the better part of an hour. That patience is precisely what holds up when the cake sits an arm's length from the people who matter to you.
Height when the moment calls for it
Intimate need not mean small. Sugar paste carries the structure for tall, multi-tiered pieces, the kind behind my eight-tier Fally with its hundred and fifty hand-made wafer paper flowers. Whether your Bonnaventure cake is a quiet three tiers or something taller, the medium makes it possible.
Placed by the hands that made it
No courier ever carries my work. I drive each cake to the venue, set it on the table, and adjust it until the flowers and the light agree. In a space this intimate, where the table placement and the daylight decide everything, that is not a flourish. It is the only way I will deliver.
Venues I design for
A small country château and a Place Vendôme ballroom ask for very different cakes. I read each setting on its own terms, then design something that could only belong there.
Château de Ferrières
Château de Champlatreux
Intimate Paris Venues
Ritz Paris & Palace Hotels
Available upon inquiryHow a wedding cake
comes to life
A First Conversation
I want to hear about it all before anything is drawn. Your setting, your taste, the mood you want the table to hold. I ask, then I listen. No form to fill, just an honest exchange about the day you are planning.
The Design
I come back with a direction shaped to Bonnaventure: the tiers, the flowers, the palette of ivory and soft botanicals. I refine it with you until it feels right, then confirm the dates and the logistics.
The Sculpting
In the two to four weeks before your wedding, the cake takes shape in Paris. Each flower is sculpted, each petal dried and set by hand. The tiers are built and dressed only in the final days, so the cake is at its freshest.
The Delivery
I drive the cake to the château myself, carry it in with care, and set it in place. I adjust until the presentation is exactly right, then leave. Your planner has one less thing to hold in mind.
A small room asks more of a cake, not less. It will be seen from close range, all evening, by the people who know you best. So I design for that scrutiny from the first sketch: a piece that earns its place on the table and seems to have grown there.
Ange Gimenez, on designing for an intimate château
& Worldwide
Answered before
you have to ask.
Other châteaux
I have worked at.
Tell me about
your day.
I take a limited number of commissions each year to ensure every piece receives my full attention. If you are planning a wedding in Paris or anywhere in the world, I would love to hear from you.