Fancy 18th Birthday Entremets

For their 18th birthday, instead of a cake, my niece requested a triple layer (dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate) mousse that I sometimes make, but fancy enough to celebrate such an important birthday. This is what I came up with.

Inside, there is almond genoise, dark chocolate marquise, milk chocolate mousse, and white chocolate mousse. The outside is mirror glaze, with colors inspired by Acheron, a new character in Honkai: Star Rail that my niece is excited about. The decorations are a caramel almond, a candied orange rind heart, and a gold leafed maraschino cherry.

I served them on a custom two-tier heart-shaped stand, designed to fit 18 entremets for 18 years. It looked nice, but I should have made it slightly less sloped because I got scared that they would slip off so I used double-stick tape to hold them in place.

Jason Cake

My niece’s 15th birthday cake features Jason, a character from an expansive world of her imagination. Jason is a Voidspawn, so the cake has a black and purple mirror glaze with silver luster dust to suggest the Void.

Jason is made of gum paste, as is the Casting Circle on top and the spectral hands floating around the cake.

Valentine Treats

These are little heart-shaped mousse cakes that I made for my family on Valentine’s Day. They are almond sponge and lemon mousse with a raspberry center and mirror glaze and dehydrated raspberry powder on top. I was hoping that they would be extremely elegant versions of my Bleeding Heart Cake, but when we first cut them, the raspberry was too frozen to bleed and when we cut another one later, too much of the raspberry had seeped into the mousse, and it still didn’t bleed. So I still have that to work on.

These hearts were the culmination of an entire day of heart-shaped food that I made for Valentine’s Day, which included heart-shaped raspberry pancakes, heart-shaped pizza with heart-shaped pepperoni, heart-shaped deviled eggs, heart-shaped strawberry gummies, heart-shaped mozzarella pockets, heart-shaped meat pies, heart-shaped beet salad, and heart-shaped cheesy breadsticks.

50th Anniversary Cake

We couldn’t celebrate my parents’ 50th anniversary in person, but that didn’t stop me from making them a cake! I tried to make a nice small cake that would be a reasonable size for two people. As usual, despite my best efforts, I made four times as much cake as the occasion required.

The outside of the cake is a blue, white, and gold mirror glaze with golden star sprinkles.

The swans at the bottom are marzipan with gold leaf on them because there were little plastic swans on Mom and Dad’s wedding cake 50 years ago.

The 50 on top is made of caramel and around the perimeter are almonds dipped in caramel.

The platter that the cake is on was (we believe) used in the wedding of some of Dad’s ancestors back three or four generations. We think it dates to the late nineteenth century. My sister and I had it repaired and replated specially for this occasion.

On the inside, the cake is alternating layers of almond cake and chocolate cake with cherry swiss buttercream between the layers. It’s meant to be reminiscent of a gelato bar that was served at Mom and Dad’s wedding, which is half chocolate, half almond with cherries in the middle.

Raspberry Mousse Cake

I was inspired to make a mousse cake for Valentine's Day, mostly because I've been watching too much of Zumbo's Just Desserts and I want to make fancy things like he makes. I'm not quite there yet.

It's a raspberry mousse with sponge cake on the bottom, and fresh raspberries inside. The decor is fresh raspberries, sugared with white, black, and gold sugars.