Delish, no?
Too bad I can’t eat it. Oh well. The hubs and kids will feast after dinner tonight.
Last night was our second lab in Cakes and Cake Decorating Class, and the first time we really got to go at it on a cake. So incredibly fun!
I didn’t get as much time as I would have liked to decorate, since we took so long learning the ropes of splitting and filling cakes and making Swiss buttercream frosting. It is a little wonky in places, and I had to use someone else’s vivid green rather than my own pastel just because I ran out of time to bag it up. But not too shabby for a first try.
Swiss buttercream, by the way, is so incredibly delicious, I think I’ll never make the regular kind again. It’s shiny and not too sweet. You get…well…heck. I’ll just show you the ingredient list that Chef J wrote on the board:
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Swiss Buttercream
Ingredients for Swiss buttercream
Place the egg whites and sugar in the mixer bowl over a pan of simmering water, and stir until the sugar is melted and the whole thing is just a little gooey, about 140 degrees. Then place this into your mixer with the whip attachment and kick it up to high for a while.
Conveniently, you don’t have to worry about overbeating, because the sugar acts as a stabilizer.
Once the mixture is well beaten, shiny and fluffy, check the temperature, which needs to come down closer to room temp before adding the butter. Usually the action of the mixer will do this, but some mixers add heat. If this happens, just place the mixer bowl into a bowl of ice for a minute or two and return your goo to the machine.
Now turn the mixer back on and add the butter, a room-temp chunk at a time (no need to be too pretty about cutting it up), while the mixer whips it together. Add the vanilla.
If you want to add chocolate, melt about 8 ounces of white chocolate or 12 ounces of semi-sweet, and let it cool slightly, then add. If you want to have some colors as well as chocolate, you can split up the batch and mix in the chocolate and the color bases separately, by hand.
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I want to walk you through everything else we did recipe-style, but it will take for-eh-vah. I’ll just regale you with photos of each step so you can be jealous that I actually get a grade for this sort of activity.
Meanwhile, I’ve found a recipe for a gluten-free poundcake, which I think I’ll use for our next project.
Stay tuned.