This eggplant cake looks so realistic you’ll do a double take
When we think of eggplants, we usually don’t think of cake. It’s safe to say that most people think of the ubiquitous eggplant emoji (and its X-rated meaning, but we won’t get into that here). If you’re a foodie, the vegetable might conjure up a plethora of savory Mediterranean dishes.
Natalie Sideserf, a baking guru from the YouTube channel Sideserf Cake Studio, may have changed those associations in an instant. The dessert-maker recently made a cake that looks like the spitting image of the real thing on the outside but is filled with chocolatey goodness on the inside.
“This cake is very special to me,” Sideserf says in the video. “And that’s because this cake is the cake I worked on while doing my very first live stream on YouTube.”
Using chocolate cake, molding chocolate, gelatin and gel food color mixed with alcohol, Sideserf sculpts an eggplant cake that looks so real you might accidentally pick it up to make baba ganoush.
By tracing the shape of an eggplant onto paper, Sideserf uses the outline to carve out pieces of chocolate cake that are true to size. She stacks the slices of the cake and uses Swiss buttercream to hold them together. Next, she lays a slab of pink molding chocolate onto the cake. Using a sculpting tool, she smoothes out the molding chocolate, and the recognizable eggplant shape and smooth texture begins to unfold.
Using purple gel food color mixed with alcohol, Sideserf begins painting the cake. While the paint dries, she carves the stem out of molding chocolate, then paints it green, before adding one more layer of dark purple paint. The final touch that elevates the aubergine into a hyper-realistic cake is the tiny dabs of gelatin. The homemade gelatin resembles water droplets that one often sees on the vegetable due to condensation.
While this eggplant may not go well with red sauce and parmesan cheese, it is a show-stopping centerpiece nevertheless.
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