These impressive little cakes feature a fluffy blueberry mascarpone mousse surrounding a half-dome of intense blueberry gelée, with a layer of soft almond sponge cake and a gorgeously shiny mirror glaze to top it all off.

These little cakes might be small, but they are immensely impressive, mainly due to the perfectly shiny layer of vibrant purple mirror glaze that enrobes them. It’s a pretty time-consuming process, but split over a few days it is more than manageable.

I’ve had a set of silicone half-sphere molds for over 3 years now, having picked them up at E.Dehillerin in Paris. I used the mini size for truffles once, but otherwise they’ve just been sitting in the cabinet, waiting to be used. (I also picked up a set of cool but completely impractical triangle cake pans which I haven’t found a use for yet either.)

So when I found myself facing two tubs full of freshly-picked blueberries, making a fancy blueberry dessert worthy of a Parisian pastry shop seemed like just the ticket.

In my experience (and by experience I mean eating fancy desserts in every city I visit) I’ve learned that the fancier the dessert, the more layers it is likely to have. If you want to pretend to be a pro pastry chef, you need at least 4 different concoctions making up a single dessert. Yes, it takes some time to make and assemble all these different components (these cakes pretty much devoured an entire weekend before I devoured them) but the final result, as I think you’ll agree, is well worth it.

In technical terms, this is called an entremet cake, or a multi-layered mousse-based cake with various complementary flavors and textures. The recipe itself is quite similar to the Sakura Matcha Mousse cake I made this spring, with an airy mascarpone mousse and a tender sponge cake as the base.

Here I went with a subtle almond-scented cake, with a blueberry mousse and then a center of intense blueberry gelée (aka fancy jello) to really max out the blueberry flavor. But where it really gets fancy is the glaze – a luscious mirror glaze that gets its name from the gorgeous mirror-like sheen.

Now, my cakes certainly are not perfect by any means. This whole mirror glaze thing is definitely a technique that one needs to master, although it’s still pretty darn cool even when it’s less than perfect.

I’ve made lots of notes for myself about how I can improve things next time (like adding some sort of decorative edging to the base, like coconut or sprinkles, to hide the mess down there). I’m also not too keen on the transition from the mousse to the cake not being perfectly smooth, and feel it might work better to have the cake layer smaller and down inside the mousse rather than sitting on top of it.

And my attempt at a swirled glaze effect? My two tone purples weren’t different enough and so you can’t really tell there are two colors at all. Note to self: next time, make the colors more distinct.

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