When I say frosting, most people think back to the white or chocolate goop on most commercially available birthday cakes. In some instances it tastes pretty good, sweet, creamy, tastes like birthday cake. And then there’s the other side of the coin, the frosting which can only loosely be called buttercream, but really has far more shortening in it than butter and tastes like you just licked the lining of a Crisco box with a lot of sugar and vanilla added to try and distract you from the feeling of slime covering your tongue. Making cakes, the actual mixing and baking is, assuming you follow the directions and scale (the baker’s term for measuring, usually using a scale in grams and measuring cups in milliliters) everything properly, fairly easy.
The real challenge begins when you want to put a coating on the cake, to make it look, well, like birthday cake, or a specialty cake. That’s when measuring and mixing become entangled with experience and a s..tload of practice. My first time making what’s called buttercream frosting was an unmitigated disaster. I followed the directions to make American Buttercream, probably the simplest of the buttercreams to make, and the frosting ended up looking like curdled cream, lumps and liquid everywhere. Back to the internet for more videos. Thank you Anna Olson (Oh Yum with Anna Olson) and John Kanel (Preppy Kitchen) for the amazing instructional videos!
Seems like my first mistake was the butter. Lesson one. When you make buttercream frosting, you’re supposed to use room temperature, unsalted butter, not the straight out of the fridge block of hard, cold butter I used. Lesson two. You need to sift the icing sugar, so you don’t have hard little rocks clumping up in the whipped butter and giving you lumps throughout the frosting. Lesson three. Add the cream as you need it, in small bits, once you’ve incorporated the sugar and butter, not the amount the recipe says, right at the beginning. OK. Second time around.
Et Voila! A beautiful, smooth, creamy, spreadable frosting. That tasted like…butter and sugar.
Remember the vanilla Steve! And a pinch of salt to enhance the flavour. Back to the stand mixer and in goes the vanilla and salt and now…NOW! I have a real vanilla buttercream. And it doesn’t taste like that store-bought stuff. It’s, it’s sweet and vanilla-y (is that a word?) and something I can be proud of.
But then I noticed that there’s a different type of frosting. It’s still a buttercream, but it’s called Swiss Buttercream. And I’m intrigued. Oh goody, another challenge.
So, back to John and Anna and their great videos. Swiss Buttercream, properly called Swiss Meringue Buttercream is a very different creature from American Buttercream. As the name says, it's a meringue based frosting, which means you have to whip egg whites and then add the butter. I know, I hear you asking, what about the egg whites? You're not supposed to eat uncooked egg whites. And you're right. The trick here is you cook the egg whites with the sugar (granulated sugar, not icing sugar) and then whip them into light fluffy clouds of meringue, into which you introduce the butter (room temperature remember). And that's when fail number two occurred.
If I'd been a bit more attentitve, I wouldn't have missed the part where you whip the egg whites until the temperature of the eggs reaches room temp before you add the butter. Another soupy mess I'd gotten myself into.
Back to the drawing board. Once again, I stood at the stove and beat the crap out of those egg whites and sugar. And whip and whip and whip and wait and, finally, the mixture reached room temp and in went the butter and...SUCCESS! An even silkier, fluffier, and less sweet frosting. I was in baking Nervana!
But wait. What's this? Yet another buttercream? Oh yes. Italian Meringue Buttercream. Back to the gurus and back to the stove to try out this new variation on a theme. And, lo and behold! It actually worked! First time out. My new favourite. It's essentially the same as Swiss, but a bit more sturdy. And now I have an asenal of three different frostings. And my journey continues.
