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.

Sweettarts Chicks, Ducks, & Bunnies

I can't remember a time when I haven't loved them. My grandma used to pack their rattly little bodies into plastic eggs for our annual Easter egg hunt, and my mom used to nestle them in a bed of plastic grass in my Easter basket. I love them because they're nostalgic and delicious and they only come once a year. They always remind me of spending time with my family and the emergence of spring.

However, they hurt my teeth badly. More than anything else in the world, they make my molars ridiculously sensitive. Therefore, during the rest of the year, I have a strict moratorium on Sweettarts of all ilks, along with Nerds, Lemonheads, and Sour Patch Kids (all of which, btw, I love). It's only the week before Easter that I allow myself to have Sweettarts, and then only the Chicks, Ducks, & Bunnies  because their superior size and powdery texture make them absolutely irresistable--I would be a fool to even try! And by "have them" I mean I buy a whole damn bag and eat it in two to three days.

This is, I know, a terrible idea, and a terrible idea that I will have annually without fail. I already have my bag this year, and my teeth are already aching! But I wouldn't give them up for anything.

I think that candy is important. Like really important. It's important to be a kid every once in awhile, to occasionally eat something that induces pure, giddy, stupid pleasure, no matter how bad it is for your teeth or your waistline. And, yes, I believe in moderation, but I also believe that I will only live once, and I would be a damned fool to ever want to let an Easter slip by without a mouthful of tooth-gouging, tongue-savaging, tummy-pudging Sweettart happiness!

Twilight: New Moon--A Review

Last night, I rented Twilight: New Moon and watched it with my mom. It was . . . long. And pretty boring. But it did give us plenty of opportunities to make cracks whenever a character took off his shirt. We could have made it a drinking game: take a shot every time you spy a bare pectoral!

The Twilight: New Moon poster.

I've mentioned before that I've read all of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, and that I enjoyed them a little too much. Her writing is terrible, her characters are shallow, and her plots are predictable at best and downright silly at worst. But they're also fun: Meyer can entertain an audience nearly indefinitely, dragging out her frivolous storylines and serious sexual tension for thousands of pages. I wouldn't read the books a second time, but they made for one great weekend's worth of reading!

What the Twilight movies miss is just that: fun. They're long (both films run a little over two hours) and exhaustive (they include every minor detail from the novels, necessary or not) and relentlessly serious. Their color palette is muted--all blacks, browns, and silvers, with occasional dashes of red and yellow--and their soundtracks are painfully emo. (I'm not saying that the music is bad, mind you, just very angsty teenager.) The movies show no sense of humor at all. Instead of a gentle awareness of Twilight's innate camp, we get a lot of awkward, twitchy teenage conversations; yearning half-kisses; and lovelorn staring.

 Teenage Bella being moody, missing Edward, and thinking about how all grownups are phony.

While watching New Moon, I couldn't help but wonder where Stephanie Meyer's deliciously silly, hyper-romantic, super-dramatic cheese-fest sensibility has disappeared to? Why is New Moon a meditation on teenage depression instead of a thrill ride of yearning and vampire make-out sessions and unnecessarily frequent werewolf fights?

The only thing that the movies get right is that everyone is incredibly good looking. In the books, the main characters are blatantly shallow, and that blandness if effective if not entirely purposeful: their vapidness allows a reader to imagine herself in Bella's generic little sneakers and imagine her own tasty versions of Edward (the vampire boyfriend) and Jacob (the werewolf boyfriend) to vicariously lust after.

The casting directors have done a great job of choosing attractive young actors who are capable but not too interesting: Bella (Kristen Stewart) is dull, likable, and very pretty; Edward (Robert Pattinson) is dreamy and has the deliciously tortured air of a pouty consumptive;  and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) combines a cute, boy-next-door sort of appeal with a whole heap of well-tanned muscles.

Battle of the beefcakes.

I think that the producers of the Twilight movies know that as long as they produce a set of four decently made movies full of pretty faces and meticulously accurate plotlines, teenage girls (and their mothers) (and 26-year-old bloggers) will show up for the spectacle. But I would have loved to see the filmmakers make Twilight their own, to make a movie with a little lightness, charm, and romance, maybe something with some rock music or characters with actual personalities. Then maybe their films would stand a chance of being watched twenty years down the road.

Instead, these filmmakers are happily raking in the cash by creating a suite of films whose expiration date seems to already have passed. Or will have passed just as soon as Robert Pattinson gets his first wrinkle or Taylor Lautner goes squishy around the waist.

Big, Fat Novels

My limit is one a year. This year, it's Middlemarch.

 The serialized first edition of Middlemarch.

Anything over 500 pages is enough to make me leery, and Middlemarch weighs in at a whopping 800 pages. I've managed to read longer, but not often.

Why do I live in terror of long novels? I fear my inability to finish them (there's nothing I hate like starting a novel and never finishing it!), but I also worry that I've chosen poorly and will find myself committed to a dullard of a novel that I have ceased to enjoy. But I also love finishing a novel and adding it to my "Already Read" list on Goodreads. It's as thrilling as checking off a daunting item on a to-do list!

It's not that I'm incapable of committing to a long book. I read Bleak House (1000 pages) twice in one month for a class, I tackled Anna Karenina (850 pages) over my dining hall lunch tray during one semester at KU, and I worked my way through The Brothers Karamazov (750 pages) while I finished writing my thesis at Penn State. Obviously, I can do it, and, obviously, it's always worth the effort: I loved every one of those books, and Brothers is now one of my all-time favorites. But still, I never look forward to the mental fortitude that big, fat novels require of me!

I'm enjoying Middlemarch thus far--Eliot is scathingly funny, incredibly smart, and darkly satirical--but when I'm not reading it, I find myself daydreaming about reading something really cheap and tawdry and fast. Something with a werewolf in it. Or a dragon!

But I won't. This is my once a year--I'm in it for the long run, even if I find myself panting a little in the home stretch!

100th Post!

To celebrate my 100th post on Poems About Oranges, I wanted to celebrate reading instead of writing. One of the unexpected outcomes of starting a blog is that I've become a fan and avid reader of many blogs that I didn't know existed a few months ago. Now, I read them daily.

Some of my favorites are funny (Cake Wrecks), and some are smart (The Best American Poetry), but my favorite blogs are those that combine funny and smart with a few strong dashes of warmth and personality--Easy Street and That Looks Cozy, I'm looking at you!


Thank you readers, for sticking around, for prodding me to update, and for commenting. And thank you fellow bloggers, for giving me something to look forward to when I open my laptop each morning!