It was my father’s birthday this weekend, and as part of the celebration I was enlisted to make a cake. I had been wanting to try my hand at homemade buttercream for quite a while and thought this was the perfect opportunity.
I had always been intimidated by buttercream, as most recipes I’ve found looked very complicated, calling for candy thermometers to make sure that the sugar was the correct temperature before being introduced to the eggs. You see, I wanted to make an authentic buttercream, and not just a frosting with butter and sugar in it. However, I caught an episode of Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network, and Ina Garten was making buttercream, and making it look easy.
The beauty of Ina’s Buttercream is that it doesn’t require any fancy temperature measurements for the sugar. Instead, you simply mix together the sugar and egg whites, heat them over a double boiler for five minutes, and them beat them into a meringue. Add in the sugar and chocolate, and you have frosting! Insanely chocolatey, buttery frosting!
The recipe itself is pretty straightforward. I used Ghirardelli chocolate for the frosting, and it turned out really well. Because the recipe calls for bittersweet and semisweet, the buttercream was very rich and delicious. One bit of warning: there is a lot of butter in this recipe. As I was making it, I was nearly nauseated by the enormous amount of fat that I was throwing into the frosting. Just get over it. I did, and it was worth it. The other tip that I can give you is to make sure that the chocolate is cooled before you add it to the meringue. It was still hot when I added it and it deflated the meringue. I had to refrigerate the frosting to get it back to the correct consistency.
This recipe also makes a ton of frosting. I didn’t end up using the cake recipe, because even though I was feeling ambitious, I didn’t have the desire, time, or equipment to make a three-tiered cake. The cake I did use was from the Epicurious website. It’s a buttermilk chocolate cake and it came out really well: rich and moist.
Next time you have a reason to bake a cake, I would recommend either of these recipes without pause.
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Mar 31, 2009 @ 13:00 EST5EDT
I love buttermilk chocolate cake! My recipe is eggless though, and super quick to make. And I always make the cheat-version of buttercream…maybe I’m missing out but there’s no way I’m fiddling around with candy thermometers. I’ll have to try Ina’s though since I’ve never made a chocolate version because it does sound very easy.