Perfect Mirror Glaze
Mirror glaze is an eye catching technique to decorate mousse cakes, entremets, and pastries. Deeply rooted in French tradition of haute pastry, this simple and easy technique will give your pastries a professional polish.
The most important thing to remember when making an entremets is that the completed cake needs to be well frozen before it is sprayed or glazed.
If the glaze slides off or doesn’t hold on to the cake:
- The glaze was applied at too high a temperature; this makes the pastry surface melt and causes your chocolate mirror glaze to slide off.
-The glaze is too runny. A recipe that isn’t well balanced or applying the wrong cooking temperatures creates a chocolate mirror glaze that’s way too fluid.
-Condensation on the frozen pastries. Condensation on your frozen cakes and entremets will prevent your chocolate mirror glaze from adhering to the surface, causing it to slide off. To avoid this, only take a few cakes or pieces of pastry out of the freezer at a time and glaze them immediately.
The glaze has air bubbles in it:
- Air was mixed in accidentally. Always mix together the ingredients of your mirror glaze at low speed in a high recipient while keeping the blade of your stick blender submerged at all times.
Cocoa Mirror Glaze
Chocolate Mirror Glaze – or Glacage Chocolat in French – is the most stunning of all cake glazes! Made with a simple mixture of cocoa, cream, sugar, water and gelatin, it’s used to make Mirror Cakes and It’s a great show-off cake, one that everyone oohs and ahhs over how shiny and reflective the glaze is – just like a mirror!
This recipe is super easy and no special equipment required – just a pastry thermometer and strainer.
120g Cocoa powder
180g Sugar
120g Double Cream
120g Water
10g Gelatin powder
50g Cold Water
Bloom the gelatin with the 50g of cold water.
With a hand blender, mix the water, sugar, sift cocoa powder and cream together.
Heat the mix until it start boiling.
Add the gelatin mass and mix again with the hand blender.
Remove from heat, strain and let the glaze set overnight in the fridge.
Reheat the glaze to a temperature of 30°C before use.
For more recipes and plated dessert ideas, join me and other 150 pastry chef at The Dessert Lab!
