Chocolate Mirror Glaze Recipe

Is there more to our food than meets the eyes or we get what we see? Let’s make chocolate glaze and see if our cakes will be the same!

We are all eating with our eyes. Well, not literally except those who experienced pepper sprays or dropped lsd on their eyeballs but the rest of us simply experience food on the old-fashioned way, visually first.

Is there beauty in food?

It’s a very important aspect of how we experience food, yet not inherently connected to our core nature. Afterall, it wasn’t part of our everyday life of seeing our food hopping around, juicy seared to golden brown begging to be eaten.

For thousands of years, it took quite an effort for early humans to take off the hides of their food and make their daily meal edible. Nuts needed to be cracked and grains required so much effort that it took ages to find ways to efficiently produce it.

Once we are hooked on something though, we are like dogs with a rag, just can’t let it go. This is how we completely altered the face of Earth in pursuit of grains, meat or our very favorite, sugar.

What’s under the glaze?

It’s not like we can’t use our eyes to spot food in the wild, as this is how we spot fruit, vegetables, and mushrooms. All our fellow Earth dwellers use their senses to acquire food, but it takes a completely different level to see something and even if it doesn’t look edible, make it so.

Of course, it took a couple of years, tries and lives to find things out due to the lack of proper equipment of early hunter gatherers but they figured it out.

Australian aboriginals found a way not just to survive on nardoo -a highly toxic or at best antinutritional plant -but thrive on it. It must have taken a couple of tries through many generations to figure out each steps of the days long process, but they did it eventually.

Does yeast really need sugar?

Sure, the explanation of the underlying process -as why do they have to roast, ground with water then add a bit of ash -was as convincing as throwing goats into volcanoes to calm the wraths of gods.

As long as the process as a whole worked, adding a couple of unnecessary rituals wasn’t frowned upon or many times such rituals were even seen as the main driver of desired results. This is why rain dances, fertility rituals or myths about yeast activation were born.

But we don’t have to go as far as Australia to find poisonous plants while we probably have them in a couple of miles from our own home or even in our back yard. Many lives have been wasted on finding out which mushroom is edible, which one kills, and which makes us meet with God.

Are all glazes the same?

Yet, mushrooms are probably still one of the trickiest kinds, as there are some poisonous ones that look identical to edible ones with the only difference, the time of the year they grow. Picking mushrooms in the wild requires extensive knowledge, not just about the mushrooms but about its surrounding to safely determine what lies underneath their caps.

Comparing cakes with poisonous mushrooms might seem like a long shot but anyone who has ever made a cake made mistakes that would have been better left unseen by the world. Yet, when a cake looks so ugly that even a husband wouldn’t touch it, we can’t just stand there watching all that ingredients and day of work go to waste.

Frostings were made to hide such failures and we can’t find better alternatives to plaster up cracks and crevices but to incite true feelings towards our creation, we have to take things a notch higher and this is when glazes come into play.

What’s in the glaze?

Mirror glazes aren’t generally used to fix up broken cakes, but they can mend broken relationships if made right.

To make a mirror glaze, first we need to have an even surface that can be achieved by spreading the previously mentioned frosting, jam or just using the flat side of the cake.

The trickiest part of making mirror glaze is the temperature as it has to be poured over the cake when it’s about 86°f / 30°C. If the glaze is colder, we may run the risk of not spreading quickly enough, leaving lumps and bumps along the way. While on the other end of the spectrum if it’s too hot it runs too quickly off the cake leaving almost nothing on top.

Bubbles are a big pain of many while preparing mirror glaze and it’s really heartbreaking to see our perfect cake to be ruined by tiny dots but if we are careful enough at mixing the ingredients, we’ll have none in the glaze when pouring over our precious cake.

Ingredients

Gelatine

4 teaspoon Gelatine or 1 Gealtine sheet
1 cup Water (for soaking / blooming gelatine)

Chocolate

⅔ cup / 150ml Water
⅔ cup / 150ml Cream
¾ cup / 75g Cocoa powder
Optional sweetener

How to make Chocolate mirror glaze

Gelatine

We can use gelatine powder or gelatine sheets, it makes no difference. Soak gelatine (aka bloom) in water until it gets a rubbery consistency.

Chocolate

Preferably in a double boiler, heat water and dissolve the cocoa powder by slowly stirring it until smooth and lump free. A simple pot on the heater can also be used but mind not to burn the cocoa.
Once we get a smooth cocoa paste, slowly stir in the cream. Be careful not to create bubbles while stirring. This recipe will result a light colored mirror glaze. For darker glaze just replace parts of the cream or the whole of it with water.
Dissolve the rubbery gelatine and add any additional sweetener if required.
Filter the mirror glaze through a fine mashed sieve as a precaution. As we haven’t used chocolate but only cocoa powder it shouldn’t be any hard pieces floating around but it’s better to stay safe then sorry.
Set it aside and let it cool to 86°F / 30°C. This part is important as too cold glaze will not spread as easily creating bumps and uneven surface while too hot glaze will run off the cake, not leaving thick enough layer to cover the cake.
Before pouring the glaze on a cake, check for any skin on top of the glaze. We used cream not milk so sometimes there isn’t skin on top but if there is any, just strain the glaze again and then pour it over the cake. Also check for air bubbles and pour the glaze form a low height to prevent the creation of undesired bubbles in the glaze.

Enjoy!

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