Is it a fruit? Is it a pastry? They’re both.
Hyper-realistic fruit-shaped desserts, called Trompe-l’œil cakes, have recently taken over social media feeds. The name is French for “deceive the eye,” an artistic term for the optical illusion of three-dimensional objects painted on two-dimensional surfaces.
These cakes aren’t that extreme, but they do look exactly like the fruits they’re emulating. And they have been served at a New Jersey bakery for the past year.
Lilla Vanilla in Hamilton crafts these little beauties shaped and colored to look exactly like glossy strawberries, raspberries and apples. The pastries are filled with mousse, cake and jams, and are almost too pretty to eat.
Lilla Vanilla in Hamilton, NJ (Lauren Musni |
NJ Advance Media)Lauren Musni
While the pastries started trending recently, most people don’t realize the ornate cakes have actually been around for much longer.
“We started offering these pastries about a year ago,” Liliya Ethridge told NJ Advance Media this week. “I’m Eastern-European, these desserts have been in our culture for at least 10 years. But trends are pretty slow from Europe to the USA.”
Technically, these are petit gâteau — French for “small cake.” But their ultra-realistic appearance places them squarely in the category of trompe-l’œil pastries.
Viral fruit pastries from Lilla Vanilla in Hamilton, NJ (Lauren Musni |
NJ Advance Media)Lauren Musni
Lilla Vanilla opened in November 2020 and has consistently been featured on NJ.com’s annual best bakeries list. The shop has a wide selection of the pretty pastries starting at $9.75, in shapes like raspberry, strawberry, apple, orange and cherry. They also make pumpkin, coffee bean and bunny-shaped pastries.
These pastries all have a similar blueprint — cake, mousse and a fruit jam (corresponding with what fruit the pastry is shaped as) all enclosed in a crunchy, colorful white chocolate shell.
The quality of the components is undeniable. But the best part is how they’re flavored for the fruits they’re shaped like. The strawberry pastry layers vanilla sponge with strawberry mousse and compote. The apple pastry had a satisfying crunch, it almost felt like biting into an actual apple.
Inside the strawberry fruit pastry at Lilla Vanilla in Hamilton, NJ (Lauren Musni |
NJ Advance Media)Lauren Musni
That said, a few of the flavors caught me off guard. The blue bunny pastry, for example, was filled with mango passionfruit mousse and compote — not the blueberry flavor I expected based on its color. The pumpkin-shaped one had a rich chocolate mousse with a Dubai chocolate center. It was delicious, but not the fall-inspired filling I anticipated. While both were tasty, the visual cues didn’t quite match the flavors.
Ethridge says that she tries to change up the flavors almost every day.
“I don’t like following the same recipes all the time,” Ethridge said. “I get bored, so I change it up (depending on) my mood and the season.”
She also noted that the bakery was making these pastries long before the trend went viral, so they will be a permanent mainstay on the menu.
Even on a random Tuesday, one variety of the fruit pastries was nearly sold out. If you want to snag one, try to get there early.
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Dining and Cooking