These festive tree-topped mousse cakes are wrapped in a red striped sponge and filled with pink peppermint mousse. Decorate them with your favorite holiday sprinkles.
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree
How lovely are thy … sprinkles?
I couldn’t resist. I had a lot of fun making these cakes, and they are created using one of my favorite pastry techniques. Stencil paste is a pastry medium made with egg whites that you can whip up at home. Just tint it a fun color and then use it to pipe or stencil designs onto a silpat or parchment paper.
For these cakes, I spread the stencil paste on a silicone baking mat and used a cake comb to create striped designs in the paste. Some of my lines were a little wavy, but the cakes turned out cute anyway!
The paste is chilled until it stiffens, and then sponge cake is spread evenly on top.
After a quick bake in the oven, the sheet of sponge cake is turned out to reveal the design. Then you can cut it or roll the cake according to your inspiration or design.
For this project I cut lengths of sponge to fit inside 3″ pastry rings, and then filled each of them with delicious pink peppermint mousse.
After the mousse is chilled, the cakes are topped with a layer of snowy white buttercream, and then topped with a sugar cone. With just a little baker’s magic (green food color and a piping tip) the sugar cone becomes an evergreen tree.
Gold and white sugar pearls made beautiful mini baubles for decorating, as did some super teeny tiny candy canes – I just love those!
You can find the recipe and more instructions for these little cuties over at Food Network.com – and I’ll link it below, too! Also, be sure to check out the video I shot of the creation of these cakes, right here.
Stunning! I love that stripe technique. I've never seen that and it is really impressive.
Thank you!
I cannot wait (but in reality will have to wait til after Christmas) to try these. It’s been on my baking to do list to make something with stencil paste.
The paste is pretty simple to whip up and is mostly egg whites, sugar and flour. I hope you have a chance to try out the technique! It can be really fun and it may give you lots of ideas for other designs.
One question – Do you have any suggestions for assembly if one doesn’t have pastry rings? They can be very expensive.
Acetate sheets are fairly inexpensive and are used to make cake collars. You can roll a few pieces to 3" diameter and tape them as a make-shift pastry ring. I'm including a link here that has a picture of an assembled cake collar. It's a big roll for $9.99.
https://amzn.to/38hgHA2
Dear Heather!
I could not find this recipe on FoodNetwork. I tried in every way how to find but it seems like does not exist.. 🙁
Oh dear. Do you happen to live in the UK? Sometimes people who live there have trouble viewing the recipes. I'm sorry about that. I think it has something to do with their securities.