Mirror Glaze Cake

Because I'm always interested in expanding my baking repertoire, I signed up last minute to learn how to make a proper super shiny Mirror Glaze cake, with Nick Totoro of Totoro Gourmet Studio, in town teaching the class! I've tried to make a simple mirror glaze cake before, but nothing fancy and definitely not a mousse cake. 

Earl Grey Mousse Cake with shiny mirror glaze

The class was all hands on and very informative, with chef Totoro giving us the step-by-step on the glaze-making and mousse cake-making process. The cake is an earl grey mousse, with a sponge cake centre and a biscuit crust.  The glaze is made of sugar, sugar and more sugar! All different types: fine sugar, sweetened condensed milk & glucose to name a few ingredients. But don't worry, most of it will drip off of the cake and only a thin layer remains, so it doesn't taste sweet when you finally eat the cake.

ta-da! shiny shiny glaze

One of the important things for glazing, is that the cake be super smooth cuz the thin glaze will highlight any small lumps and bumps. Also, the cake has to be frozen solid when you pour the glaze over or it might melt the surface and mess up the glaze.

striped chocolate panel deco

The base glaze is white (thanks to the addition of white food colouring to make it whiter), and can be dyed any colour using gel food colouring.  For the class, we went with a red base, and a swipe of white on top. 

my shiny mirror glaze cake

I'd say the trickiest thing about the glazing process is getting the temperature of the glaze right when pouring it over the cake. Too hot, and the layer will be too thin and the cake will show through. Too cold, and the layer will be too thick as the glaze sets up too fast, resulting in a very sweet thick glaze layer. And with glazing, there's really very little you can do to "control" the pattern that you end up with. You can really only swipe the surface with an offset spatula once or twice at the most. Anymore and you'll prob scrape the glaze off and expose the cake. 

chef Totoro with our masterpieces

all the lovely cakes everyone made in class

So anyway, here's what we ended up with! Pretty cool effect! It's already pretty neat on its own, but it can be accented with whatever you wish, some fancy chocolate curls or squares, macarons, biscuits etc. The lovely macarons in class were from Macarons.sg. There were even a pair of macarons printed with a cute Totoro cartoon on it for chef Totoro! 

chef Totoro''s cake

I can't wait to experiment with different colours & mousse cake flavours! Thanks to chef Totoro for an awesome class, and to Fiona Lau of Baking's Corner for organising the class! I would really love to learn how to do the spiderweb effect next!

pic with chef Totoro!

Update: the cake survived for a week (the full 7 days!) in the fridge cuz I kept it 'til my husband came back from an overseas trip. While the glaze was less shiny and the colour changed to a more orangey hue instead of the Christmas red that it originally was, it still tasted awesome! Here's what it looked like inside:

care for a slice?