  From human tissue to fruits, many soft materials are coated by a thin layer
of a stiffer material. While the primary role of such a coating is often to
protect the softer material, the thin, stiff coating also has an important
effect on the mechanical behaviour of the composite material, making it appear
significantly stiffer than the underlying material. We study this cloaking
effect of a coating for the particular case of indentation tests, which measure
the `firmness' of the composite solid: we use a combination of theory and
experiment to characterize the firmness quantitatively. We find that the
indenter size plays a key role in determining the effectiveness of cloaking:
small indenters feel a mixture of the material properties of the coating and of
the substrate, while large indenters sense largely the unadulterated substrate.
