Experiments in Frosting

Velcome to my lab-OR-a-TOR-y!

If you read this blog regularly, you've probably noticed that I'm always fussing over frostings. Frostings are hard, unlike the cakes themselves, which almost always turn out. But matching the correct frosting with the right cake has always been much more difficult for me.

So what's a girl to do when she knows nothing about making a good frosting? She makes three in one night, of course, to teach herself how!

I decided to try my experimental frostings on Magnolia Bakery's Vanilla Cake, which is the cake I used for my last birthday cake. I knew that it would make a delicious base for my frostings without getting in their way.

I decided to make three kinds of frosting: royal icing, "Mom's Chocolate Frosting" from Ann Hodgman's Beat This!, and a chocolate ganache. Unfortunately, my royal icing refused to fluff with beating (pasteurized egg whites just don't work, unfortunately!), and I was left with some sugary glue instead of frosting.

Yummy! Royal glue destined for the garbage disposal.

Fortunately, I had enough butter in the house to make Gale Gand's Quick Vanilla Buttercream frosting instead. That turned out to be a fantastically good plan B.

The drool-inducing, spoon-licking buttercream goodness.

I mean, this stuff was good, way better than the buttercream frosting recipe that Magnolia Bakery uses on their vanilla cake; that frosting was heavy and cloying and crusty. But Gand's frosting, even though it's about 70% butter by volume, isn't overwhelmingly buttery or sugary. Instead, it tastes like fresh whipped cream, only sweeter and richer and, miraculously enough, whiter.

The trick to this amazing stuff is beating the butter and sugar together for three full minutes on medium power. This extra beating time transforms the butter from yellow and clumpy to pale and airy and delicate. And the dash of heavy cream beaten in right at the end makes the frosting taste unusually fresh and smooth. This was so good, that I literally had to stop myself from eating it by the spoonful! And I never do that with frosting (just cookie dough) (and cake batter) (but never frosting, I promise!).

The first nine-inch cake round frosted with buttercream.

The second recipe I tried was Mom's Chocolate Frosting. I had never made a chocolate frosting before, so I felt like I should try a recipe that was simple (Check!), required few ingredients (Check!), and called for a ridiculous amount of pure melted chocolate (Double check! This calls for twelve ounces of chocolate in a full recipe.).

However, besides the royal icing, this frosting was the most touchy one to make. Once the chocolate was melted, I added room-temperature vanilla and refrigerator-cold sour cream to mixture, which caused tiny bits of the chocolate to seize up and solidify--ack! But I whipped the mixture furiously and the ugly little chocolate crumbs melted away to reveal a beautiful, smooth, light brown frosting.

The sweet rewards of my furious beating.

To be honest, I didn't like tasting this frosting without a cake beneath it. It was just too sour for me, due partly to the sour cream base and partly to the Ghirardelli chocolate I used (which, to me, always tastes a little sour).

But once it was on the cake, this frosting was scrumptious and accessible. It's the kind of friendly, palate-pleasing frosting that a batch of ravenous six-year-old birthday party attendees would enjoy smearing all over their faces. (Hence the "Mom's" title, I suppose!) And it would be exceptional on a yellow butter cake.

Mom's Chocolate frosting on its cake round.

The final frosting, the ganache, turned out to be my runaway favorite. It's unbelievably simple to make: just heat heavy whipping cream to a simmer, pour it over finely chopped semisweet chocolate, and stir them together until . . .

 A smooth goop of mind-bending goodness.

 . . . it becomes a smooth goop of mind-bending goodness.

After the ganache cools for a few minutes, you pour it over the cake and smooth it out with a spatula. If you're more patient and less greedy than I am (and if you have a cooling rack to frost on), a ganache can actually turn out beautifully. Done my way, it turns out . . . well, you know:

"I'm pretty on the inside, darnit!"

As I wrote in my tasting notes, this frosting is "the most amazing thing that ever happened to anyone ever." And I made this recipe with cheap old Baker's chocolate--with really high quality chocolate, this would probably make a piece of soggy cardboard taste delicious.

At the end of the night, I ended up loving all of these recipes in different ways. I can't wait to try Mom's Chocolate Frosting on a yellow layer cake, I know that I'll make the vanilla buttercream at every chance I get, and the ganache--oy, the ganache!--will soon find itself smeared on strawberries and spritz cookies and chocolate crisp cookies and very moist and dense chocolate cakes.

The triumverate.

I'll leave you here with one last tasty idea for trying these frostings: cut out the crumby middleman and go straight to the good stuff with the frosting shot.