PARIS — The line of sweets lovers grows outside the store. “They’ve been waiting for more than a month, so we’re going to give them a kiss,” star pastry chef Pierrick Grolard tells TV cameras covering the opening of his Parisian boutique. Inside, he sells “caramel praline balls,” sold at 329 euros a pair, molded directly on his own.
“There’s hair. It’s Pierrick’s real hair. It’s incredible, it’s going to add a crunch to the texture,” one customer exclaims. It’s all fake, of course: this parody, viewed millions of times on YouTube, was imagined by comedian Malik Bentalha. It says a lot about the fame of the celebrity who inspired it: Cédric Grolet.
The slender 30-something is not first to work on edible imitations. In his day, Antonin Carême (1784-1833) fascinated European elite with his recreations of Chinese pavilions and valleys made of sweet pastes. But by sharing his famous real-fake fruits on social media (nearly 10 million Instagram followers), Grolet has popularized the genre. For 18 euros a piece, you can treat yourself to passion fruit, mango or chocolate French toast trompe-l’œils in the boutique that Le Meurice opened for its protégé in 2018.
“The world’s most copied pastry chef”
“Cédric made trompe-l’œil accessible. He’s done everything, and it has became a classic. For a long time, he didn’t mold: he sculpted. He was the only one to do that. It all started with a pebble at Le Meurice. We pastry chefs thought, ‘This guy’s a genius.’ He’s the most copied pastry chef in the world. He succeeded in doing the most difficult thing of all: inventing a style,” says fellow Parisian pastry chef Jeffrey Cagnes. Grolet’s first book, Fruits, has sold more than 32,000 copies, according to Edistat estimates, an excellent performance for such a technical and beautiful book.
“Trompe-l’œil pastry will invade shop windows of the 2020s, just as revisited éclairs did 10 years ago.”
If you’re going to be copied, you might as well supply the tools: Grolet has teamed up with Pavoni, the Italian specialist in professional cake molds, to launch a collection in his name. The company claims to have sold more than 20,000 Grolet molds worldwide since 2019, with prices ranging from 30 to 80 euros. With the company’s success, some pastry chefs say they have waited several months to receive the famous molds. Silikomart, an Italian competitor, is equally popular.
Thanks to this equipment, it’s no longer unusual to come across an apple- or lemon-shaped cake in a bakery in a medium-sized French city. In Lille (Maison Beauchamp) and Lyon (Marcel), you’ll even find bakeries that have made them a mainstay. At Marcel, such cakes account for 70% of business. “We had to find something to differentiate ourselves and create a bit of a buzz,” says owner Mathieu Jullien, noting that competition in his neighborhood is strong with 16 bakeries and pastry shops. Except for a cappuccino, which is not a cappuccino, his range is visually reminiscent of Grolet’s.
Copies? Jullien rejects that idea. While he speaks of “Grolet-style” creations, he says he uses “his own recipes, techniques and ingredients”. Count on paying 7.50 euros a piece, half the price of the original. It’s hard to measure this phenomenon, but Franck Lacroix, editor-in-chief of the leading professional monthly Le Journal du Pâtissier, says “trompe-l’œil pastry will invade shop windows of the 2020s, just as revisited éclairs did 10 years ago.”
Beyond trompe-l’oeil, the message
On YouTube, you’ll find a host of tutorials on how to make trompe-l’œils at home. Even a fake dishwashing sponge, with fake liquid soap and foam, has gained a cult following, thanks to British chef Ben Churchill. The Privé de Dessert restaurant, which specialize in this culinary art, offers a similar version with a financier cake base. Since its launch in 2013, the restaurant, with three Paris locations, has served 650,000 trompe-l’œils, and a cookbook published by Marie Claire is scheduled for release this spring.
Amid this craze, sweets players have thrown themselves into the race to become the most spectacular. Amaury Guichon, a Franco-Swiss pastry chef with 13.8 million Instagram followers, shares his life-size chocolate sculptures, including motorcycles, leopards and giraffes. Turkey’s Tuba Geçkil, whose TikTok account has almost 4 million followers, creates hyper-realistic dishwasher knives or whole doors. These feats inspired the Netflix series “Is it a Cake?”, which premiered in 2022.
Each season of Top Chef brings its share of trompe-l’œil challenges, such as an edible tablecloth made from poultry stuffing. Culinary trend consultant Baptiste Aubour explains, “The less it looks like cooking, the more it engages people: a shoe that tastes like chicken with morel mushrooms will be disconcerting. Artistic performances will always attract more people. I’m simplifying, but it’s also a way of attracting people who like morel chicken and shoes! And since you can’t taste food on TV, it’s the visual that counts, so trompe-l’œil has always been very well suited for the small screen.”
What is the future of culinary fakery? “Beyond the trompe-l’œil, it’s the message that will count in the future,” Aubour says. The consultant cites chef Rasmus Munk of the Alchemist, a two-star restaurant in Copenhagen, where customers enjoy foie gras placed inside a silicone human head, intended to invite guests to reflect on the product, which in this case is from Spanish geese that have not been force fed.
Egyptian-born American Laila Gohar, who in just a few years has become the gastronomic darling of the Anglo-Saxon media, takes a more poetic view of trompe-l’œil. She recently sold a limited-edition orange blossom cake in New York, imitating an old baking dish adorned with a swan. Her commitment touches on politics, too, such as when she created towers of cherry tomatoes, green olives, and white marshmallows decorated with black ribbons, the colors of the Palestinian flag, for a buffet. Through their work, Gohar and those who have followed in her footsteps (Imogen Kwok in London, Andrea Sham in Paris) are seen more as an artists than chefs. In the image of Antonin Carême, who in his time exchanged with Rossini, Chopin and Delacroix.
