No, it’s not soap. It’s not cake, either. Viral fruit pastries are hyper-realistic desserts, but don’t let that confuse you with the real thing — that “strawberry” may taste like mango.
French pastry chef Cédric Grolet is credited with creating the trendy treats around a decade ago; given their lifelike appearance, he dubbed them “trompe-l’œil,” referring to an optical illusion. Recently a social media sensation, fruit pastries are a popular order at Cookie Bite Pastry, which opened in July at 2021 W. Franklin St. After moving to the U.S. from Jerusalem, Israel, three years ago, chef Hanna Denes started her pastry business from home, creating cookies, cakes, macarons, and bite-sized treats. A customer sent her videos of fruit pastries, trying to convince her to make them.
“I said, ‘OK, I’m going to give it a shot,’” she recalls. “I bought ingredients for mango and raspberry fruit pastries, and it went crazy.”
Making each dessert is an involved, three-day process. “You need to freeze it overnight between every single step,” Denes says. The puree center is created first and then surrounded by mousse and a layer of white chocolate. Denes then dips her creations in chilled cocoa butter with food coloring and uses a cooking airbrush to give them a realistic finish.
The most popular flavor at Cookie Bite Pastry is strawberry — “everybody likes strawberries,” Denes says — but lemon and mango also are common requests among 20 options including strawberry cheesecake, raspberry chocolate, mango, orange, peach, cherry chocolate, caramel apple, banana, and piña colada, a summer special.
Denes uses the same create-and-freeze method to craft larger hyper-realistic pastries, including a coffee bean version — her favorite — with coffee mousse around an espresso ganache center. She also makes a “mega” raspberry lookalike cake filled with two layers of mousse. Her eye-catching confections are gaining notice: A short video of Denes dipping the raspberry cake into pink cocoa butter scored 2.6 million views online.
The treats are “delicate, not overpowering or too sweet,” she says. “I try to keep it very balanced.”
