The little one told us to surprise her with a party for her birthday later this month. I decided to go for a party “Under the Sea” and I want to make a special cake with a “mirror glaze” frosting. Mirror glaze is a special type of frosting which is, you may guess it, very smooth and shiny. Since I’ve never done this before I decided to make a cake for Mr’s birthday last Sunday and try it out, since he can cope with “delicious cake that looks like roadkill”, just in case that things don’t work as they should, but they did.

Actually it turned into two cakes, because I had too much batter for my pan, so he got a galaxy cake with a strawberry cardamom filling and a Ferrero Rocher cake.

For a “how to”, click below the fold

Now, while cakes should look nice, they should also taste nice. I don’t like “novelty cakes” that are just buttercream and food colouring although both play a big role here.

First I made two chocolate cakes on Friday already, so they could cool overnight. I also made caramelized almonds for the Rocher cake (I don’t like hazelnuts)

The next day I prepared a lot of Italian buttercream, some with dark chocolate, some with Nutella and filled the small cake with the almond caramel and the Nutella buttercream. The cake got soaked with simple coffee syrup.

I also made some “reusable” cake boards from flexible but sturdy cutting boards.

The big cake got a strawberry cardamom filling with pureed strawberries, strawberry farmer’s cheese, cardamom (freshly grounded) and whipped cream (gelatine for stability). I added some orange flavour to the simply lemon syrup I still had and it was delicious.

It was then covered in the chocolate buttercream.

It wasn’t as smooth as I wanted it to be and it showed in the results. I think my buttercream was too warm.

Next everything went into the freezer overnight. A mirror glaze is warm and it would “wash away” your buttercream, but I think a few hours are better because I took the cake out the next morning and the big one was still half frozen when we wanted to eat it in the afternoon.

I also made use of the leftover (cut off cake tops, buttercream) and made cake pops that the little one can take to school with her. That’s a good use of those things anyway (before you eat the buttercream all alone) and you always have some quick “cake” at hand. Just remember to make the holes into the cake pops before you freeze them.

And now for the mirror glaze. You can find various recipes but they all have the same ingredients more or less:

sugar

(glucose) syrup (optional)

sugared condensed milk

white chocolate

gelatine

The sugar is boiled to 105°C, the milk is added, then the chocolate and finally the gelatine.

Once it has cooled down to 35°C you can die it to your heart’s desire. For the Rocher cake I only added golden lustre dust as the colour was already nicely golden, the galaxy cake got two different blues, pink, purple and blue lustre dust. To add it you have to put your cake on glasses or cups so the glaze is free to drip off. You can simply cool and re-heat the leftover glaze, so make sure you do this over a parchment of foil covered baking tray or something. And then you just pour the glaze. If there are any air bubbles, just use a needle.

Here you are. The glaze went well and wasn’t that complicated if you’re familiar with sugar thermometers and gelatine, although I’d use more chocolate than my recipe asked for (1 part sugar, 1 part syrup, 1 part chocolate, more or less).