I taste tested the viral cakes that look like fruit and nuts. Which L.A. bakeries make the best ones?

Los Angeles Times

7 hours ago

More than 115 million people watched a video of French pastry chef Cédric Grolet make fruit pies that resemble giant blueberries, peaches, oranges and raspberries. A peach dessert molded and spray-painted to look like a real peach drew 63.6 million views. Caramelized banana and peanut butter logs clumped together to mimic a bunch of bananas captivated nearly 33 million people.
Grolet is known for his trompe-l'œil desserts, elaborate creations constructed from various fruit, nut brittles, mousse, cake, creams, custards and chocolates. He's created desserts that look like oversize peanuts, Buddha's hands and just about every other nut, stone fruit and berry. I have spent hours on TikTok, mesmerized by these edible works of art.
'These types of desserts have been around for a while, but Cedric would be the one who started the trend and brought these kinds of desserts into popularity,' says Catherine Zhang, chef and partner at Tu Cha boba and dessert shop in Koreatown.
Thanks to Zhang, and a handful of other chefs in Los Angeles, the trompe-l'œil fruit and nut-shaped desserts have made their way west.
Zhang and her partners opened Tu Cha in March with a short menu of fruit-shaped desserts and what she calls 'dream cakes.' The most popular is the My Man Go ($14.50), made with fresh mango encased in crème fraîche mango mousse with hazelnut praline in a tropical chocolate shell made to look like a real mango. When you crack into the chocolate, the mousse is smooth and almost jellylike with a center that tastes like you're biting into a ripe mango.
The Berry3 ($14.50), pronounced 'berry cube,' is presented like a cube-shaped raspberry. It's a striking red dessert covered in crimson velvet spray that gives the surface the textured, almost hairy look of a real raspberry. Inside, there's a core of pistachio praline with both raspberry mousse and strawberry coulis.
'It's pretty crazy how popular these desserts have been with the help of social media,' Zhang says. 'We have food creators who have made it a trend to eat these desserts in your car. Those videos get millions of views and people come from that.'
A small team of chefs works around the clock to produce about 1,000 desserts a day, but it's never enough. Tu Cha sells out of every cake, every day.
'I don't think people understand the complexity behind the desserts and how long it takes to create each one,' Zhang says. 'We are capped at the number we can produce each day because of our freezer space and the number of molds.'
Each dessert takes three days to make. The various components are all made by hand, layered, chilled, molded, chilled again, dipped and sprayed.
Then there's the Dubai Pistachio ($22). It's a heart-shaped cake embedded in a black tin, layered with matcha sponge cake, pistachio knafeh, matcha mousse and matcha white chocolate. You use a spoon to crack the matcha white chocolate, then navigate through the many layers to the bottom of the tin. The matcha flavor is intense, bitter and grassy, tempered by the sweet chocolate and crunchy, nutty knafeh.
'After we launched, these desserts have become massive,' she says. 'I feel like it's everywhere now. Everyone has picked it up. Every dessert shop is trying its own version.'
The Grigoryan family has been making a wide array of Armenian pastries at their Burbank bakery since 2014. Owner Art Grigoryan started experimenting with fruit-shaped mousse desserts. Now, the bakery produces half a dozen varieties that resemble pears, red and green apples, oranges, raspberries and mangoes.
The core of each dessert is a fruit filling, with fresh diced mangoes in juice that oozes from the center and a wallop of sweet and bitter citrus in the orange.
The apple filling conjures images of cinnamon-spiked apple pie. All the fillings are sheathed in silky mousse with an outer layer of Belgian chocolate.
'We're planning on bringing back pistachio, coconut, avocado and lemon soon,' says Art's son David Grigoryan.
At $10 each, they are the most affordable of all the trompe-l'œil desserts we tried.
When Kay Kara opened Aurora on South La Brea Avenue in the fall of 2023, the glass case that lines the store was filled with classic French desserts and chocolates. His executive pastry chef and master chocolatier, Nour Ramlawi, was trained in Switzerland and spent years as a pastry chef in Dubai.
Kara and Ramlawi first introduced a lemon-shaped confection in March 2024, and it quickly became one of the shop's top sellers.
'We are pretty much following an international trend that started in France, and we thought we could do something similar for L.A.,' Kara says. 'The city was being underserved and the choices were not as novel as what was going on in Europe.'
Kara tasked Ramlawi with transforming an existing mango dessert into a mango-shaped creation called Mango Madness ($15). It's a sunset-colored orb with a crunchy white chocolate shell, mousse and a fresh mango center.
'When we saw the trend of the fruit-shaped desserts was catching, we thought maybe we should follow the theme and we changed the shape,' Kara says. 'I needed to have something that was Instagrammable, and eventually people caught up with what we were doing and it became viral,' he says. 'It's been going viral for over a year now.'
Ramlawi introduces a new fruit dessert every couple of months. Recently, there was a Meyer lemon-filled Lemon County ($12) and a banana-shaped Musa ($15) built with layers of double chocolate and Speculoos, banana coulis, caramel and chocolate fondant spongecake.
The Orangiumum ($25) and Rose Razzleberry ($25) are massive approximations of the fruits they are meant to resemble. A cross-section of the orange boasts eight different preparations of orange and multiple days of assembly. There's orange cake, a crispy crepe, orange rind, mousse and coulis. Near the center is a round of rice pudding and the entire thing is dipped in white chocolate that's decorated to look like a sun-kissed orange. An actual leaf (I learned this the hard way) protrudes from the top.
The Rose Razzleberry is just as elaborate, with a base of chocolate cake, Pop Rocks candy, Champagne mousse, chocolate mousse and raspberry coulis.
'I think it's time for L.A. to evolve beyond the doughnut and the cupcake,' Kara says. 'The city deserves more.'
Anita Aykazyan says the La Pistache is 'the best dessert' in the pastry case at the Glendale shop. The dessert mirrors an unshelled pistachio, with beautiful striations of green and brown and an uneven surface covered in realistic grooves.
'This is actually his,' she says. 'I took classes with Grolet and was inspired by his work.'
The La Pistache ($18) is a three-day process that involves a pistachio cream crunchy with pistachio praline, pistachio ganache and white chocolate. Each one is molded and decorated by hand.
Before La Pistache, there was the Raspberry Petit Gateau, a dessert originally offered when the shop opened in April 2024. It underwent a series of transformations, including a heart-shaped design, before Aykazyan found a raspberry mold.
'When we started a year and a half ago with the raspberry dessert, there were not a lot of places doing them,' she says. 'Some places were making lemon or orange but no raspberries.'
Aykazyan only offers the raspberry during the summer, and makes an effort to keep her dessert case as seasonal as possible. The petite gateau may be the most lifelike of them all, with a deep red color and a furry velvet exterior. Inside is a light, luscious mousse she learned to make while studying under Ksenia Penkina, a Russian baker based in Vancouver, Canada. And in the very center, a whole raspberry.
'We're a little behind Europe, but right now, this is a trend in L.A. because they look realistic,' Aykazyan says. 'I also think it's because they are fun and really yummy.'
To see our favorites, watch a full taste test of all the desserts mentioned above in our video here, or on YouTube.