Mirror Glazing

My boyfriend and I celebrated our 14th month together yesterday. He works during the afternoon/night so we decided to celebrate after. So while he was busy with work, I mustered up the courage to go for my first attempt at mirror-glazing a cake.



We're not the celebrate-every-month type of couple. And although I bake every occasion I get to, this is actually the first time I baked a cake for the two of us. I don't know what it was but I just felt like celebrating this month. 14 months is a long time and I felt like giving him cake.

So the cake. It had to be chocolate because he loves chocolate cake. The icing can't be buttercream because although I love the piping characteristics of buttercream, I'm not as enthusiastic with its taste. So of course, I went with ganache! I've tried whipped ganache before, and so for the sake of continuous learning, I opted for glazing the cake this time.

To make ganache for glazing, the recipe is simple. You need equal parts cream to chocolate. In this case, because my cake was short, I used 75g cream and 75g dark chocolate. To make it glossy, I added 10g butter. I would say though that it wasn't as glossy as I wanted it to be. Maybe more butter next time. Or corn syrup.

Here's a good video of how to do it.

Now, if the black and white photos and the cashews on the sides don't give you a clue, the mirror glazing failed. No, I'm just kidding. I thought it was good for a first time. The only points of improvement would be to make the ganache more glossy and to crumb coat (yes, I didn't crumb coat! Oh, the shaame!) the cake first. Oh, and also not to use a spatula to fix it too much.


But all that technicality obviously didn't matter to him. As soon as he saw the cake, he thought it lacked something so he carved the mirror glaze! Hahaha! To 14 months and counting.:)