13 Fancy Dishes You Should Never Try To Make At Home

For all you ambitious cooks, hosting a dinner party is a great excuse to show off your culinary skills. The week before the party, you'll be planning the menu, practicing dishes, and figuring out how best to impress your guests with your most decadent creations. However, you need to remember that your skills only go so far: You're not actually an award-winning chef, you're not cooking supported by a team of professionals, and you're not in a fully-equipped restaurant kitchen. Consequently, there are some dishes that you should never attempt at home.

Baumkuchen is a traditional Swiss cake, which is almost impossible to make at home, unless you have some incredible baking skills, and a lot of patience. This labor-intensive cake involves making multiple paper thin layers of cake, which are baked one at a time on top of each other under a grill, to create a cake which looks like the intricate grain of a tree trunk.

Make a Swiss roll, slice it thinly, and use it to form the outer shell of this delicate cake. Filled with a set raspberry bavarois, this has the potential to be the lightest, sweetest dessert. It also has the potential to be a squashed mess, if the custard doesn't set quite perfectly, and the Swiss roll exterior collapses, which is why you should probably just skip trying this one at home.

Baking the perfect flaky, buttery croissant will take you at least two days. Two days of endlessly rolling, folding, resting, and chilling this rich dough. Making croissants is a drawn-out, delicate process, which no amateur baker should attempt to undertake without lots of guidance, step-by-step images, plenty of patience, and a significant amount of spare time.

Mille-Feuille may look like a simple dessert with its three layers of pastry, separated by a vanilla pastry cream, and maybe some fresh berries, but it's far from easy to perfect. The pastry in this French treat is called pâte feuilletée, which the professionals deem to be one of the most difficult pastries to make. If the professionals say it's a struggle, we suggest you don't try it at home.

This 14-stage, six-part recipe involves making marzipan, fondant roses, a genoise sponge, fresh jam, and vanilla custard, and is, in reality, distressingly difficult. We recommend that you don't waste several days trying to put this Swedish cake together, and take a trip to Stockholm if you want to try a slice instead.

If you're making a soufflé, there are two fatal things that can go wrong: It could not rise at all and remain a flat, underwhelming mush of whipped eggs, or it could rise perfectly in the oven, only to fall flat into a sunken mess as soon as you take it out. Serving soufflés at a dinner party is a risky move, unless you have a professional oven, and the most delicate of folding techniques.