Frostings, Icing, and Fondant

First, big news for the Cake Flake! My mother bought me a Wilton class at Joann, and I'm starting Fondant and Gumpaste on February 4th. I've been spending a lot of time trying to get the equipment and ingredients together. The class is pretty inexpensive if you catch a special, but the supplies run about $100, which my mother include in her gift. Thank you, Mom!

I stated in my first post that, as I prioritize taste over appearance, I was not interested in fondant. My Wilton teacher told me that fondant tastes like you had put a piece of chewing gum on top of your cake. Well, a couple of months ago I taught a cake decorating class for the Young Women's group at church with Kelly Hall of Sweet Nectar Confections. I taught buttercream and she taught fondant, and she shared with me some Satin Ice Fondant, which tasted like plain sugar and wasn't too chewy. I now find the idea of fondant pretty interesting, and I LOVE some of the things you can do with it decoratively.

I've been thinking a lot about frostings since I started the blog. I even did a taste test a while ago. I like many bakers, like Italian or Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which has a ratio of 1 part sugar to 1 part butter (as I made it; recipes do vary). Everyone else at the tasting said that the meringue frostings were too rich or even greasy, and preferred the American Buttercream, made with 2 parts sugar to 1 part butter. I revived the 1:1 ratio in my new Fudge Frosting.

The "greasy" comment brings me to another thought. In buttercream, the dominant favors are sugar and butter. If the frosting does not have enough sugar for your taste, it will seem fatty or greasy because that's the only other dominant flavor. In meringue buttercreams, the meringue adds body but not flavor. A cream cheese or chocolate frosting adds complexity with either tangy or bitter flavors. But, absent a third player, a frosting is either too sweet, too rich, or, ideally, in balance.

Again I have mentioned taste. People have very different preferences for sweetness. Early in our relationship I made my now-husband a lemon meringue pie, his favorite dessert, from a Cooks Illustrated recipe. He hated it because it was way too sour for his preference. I loved it and, embarrassingly, ate the whole pie in the next couple of days. I learned two valuable lessons: one in my husband's blunt honesty, and another in the importance of cooking to your audience's taste.

So what I the correct sweetness for frosting? 2:1, 1:1, or as Rose Levy Berenbaum specifies, 1 part sugar to 2½ parts butter? The correct answer is, of course, any and all of these, depending on the occasion. Based on my taste test I default to the 2:1 American Buttercream. If I am baking for myself or another baker I would use a 1:1 frosting.

But fondant allows an interesting possibility. Perhaps I can frost a cake with a less sweet frosting, then top it with thinly rolled fondant? Then you could eat the fondant or not, and enjoy your individual sweetness preference. I can't wait to try it.

A final thought: frosting versus icing. My husband has been teasing me about this question since I started the blog. According to Serious Eats, frosting is thicker and richer, while icing tends to be thinner and sweeter, though these aren't absolute. That makes sense to me, and I've tried use the more specific (IMO) word frosting in my blog.

The endless varieties of frostings and icings fascinates me, and I will continue to read recipes and bug every baker I meet.

 

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Painted Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake?

"You don't put carrots in cake . . . What do you mean the icing's so good I should try it anyway? Alright, cut me a piece." Ralphie May (offensive language)

First, if you don't love carrots, you should go right now and try Mark Bittman's Glazed Carrots (leave out the orange juice). I can wait.


Now that we all love carrots, let's make a cake!

Developing a Recipe

I read just about every recipe for carrot cake I could find. Again, a surprising degree of consensus. As standard, I checked ATK and KAF, as well as the sources at Epicurious: Joan Nathan's Jewish Holiday Cookbook and Bon Appétit. I even made a dorky table of the ingredient variations.

You know, for a cake born out of shortages and thought of as a health food, carrot cake has quite a bit of sugar and oil.

The most significant variations I found were in the spices. I decided, based on my own tastes, to go with cinnamon, ground ginger, and ground cloves.

Making the Cake

I started by peeling one pound of carrots. My husband kindly grated them for me. Instead of a box grater, I have coarse Microplane grater I bought at Wiiliams Sonoma almost 15 years ago. It makes thin shreds of carrot; I consider these thin shreds to be important to the final texture of the cake.

In a large bowl I whisked the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ground ginger, and ground cloves.

In my mixer, I combined the eggs and brown sugars, then slowly added the vegetable oil. It took a minute or so to fully incorporate the oil into the batter.

Next I stirred in the flour on very low speed.

Finally I stirred in the carrots as gently as I could. I gave the batter a quick scrape and fold with a silicone spatula. I could a good bit of unincorporated batter on the bottom of the bowl, which was not a surprise given the minimal stirring.

You may have noticed that this doesn't seem much like a cake batter. Surprise! It's a quick bread, at least by mixing method. But that's OK.

I tasted the batter for seasoning--yuk, yuk yuk! The raw shredded carrots are WAY to similar to the texture of shredded coconut. The flavor was fine though.

I sprayed my pans with flour and oil spray, lined them with parchment circles, then sprayed the paper. I portioned the batter into the two pans, weighing them to be sure they were even. I then applied the cake strips and put them in the oven.

I baked the cakes for 33 minutes, which is a while for layer cakes. I am very glad that I used the cake strips and weighed the pans, as the cakes have risen right up to the rim and are almost completely level.

Icing the Cake

After the cakes were cool and the ingredients procured, I made a double recipe of the icing. I used the KAF recipe I have used before and find very yummy. As I was not planning dimensional decorations, I used 4 tablespoons of milk for a very soft icing.


I frosted the cake and pressed chopped pecans into the sides, then put the cake in the refrigerator to chill and crust. Did you know that cream cheese icing can crust? I didn't. Later I smoothed the top of the frosting with some parchment paper and my hands.

I decided to paint on this cake. I had read about painting on cookies with food color and vodka in the SprinkleBakes Book. I actually keep vodka around for my pie crusts, even though I don't drink.

I used Wilton gel food colors like watercolors, and diluted them with vodka. You have to be very gentle when painting on frosting. My 7-year-old was very interested and wanted to try it himself. As I let him poke at my cake and got him some paper, I reflected on how odd it seems to be painting with vodka with a kid :-)

Recipe

12 1/2 ounces, or 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

4 eggs

1 1/2 cups vegetable oil

1 lb carrots, peeled and shredded

2 batches cream cheese icing

6 ounces chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 375. Spray 2 9-inch pans with oil and flour spray, line wih parchment rounds, and spray the parchment.

In large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ground ginger, and ground cloves.

In another large bowl or in a mixer, combine eggs and sugars. Then mix in vegetable oil until combined. Gently stir in flour mixture, then grated carrots.

Evenly divide batter between pans. Wrap with cake strips, if using, and bake.

Start testing cakes for doneness at 25 minutes. Cakes are done when you can touch the top of the cakes and the cake doesn't crush, but resists slightly.

Cool cakes in pans on a rack. When cakes are completely cool, turn out and frost. Press pecans onto the sides, striving for even coverage.

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Chocolate Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

I have a very sneaky strategy for how to improve my baking and have cakes to write about. I look in my church newsletter for upcoming birthdays. Next I pick someone I know (I'm pretty new to the church), then I ask if I can bake him or her a birthday cake. It's working pretty well so far.

I asked Leah what kind of cake she likes, and her answer was "It's all about the frosting . . . cream cheese frosting!" There was a brief mention of Red Velvet Cake, but I ignored that. I'm from Maryland, where Red Velvet has always been a regional specialty, and I KNOW that you only use boiled milk frosting on Red Velvet. The rest of the country just has it wrong.

I mentioned some other kinds of cake I would be willing to put cream cheese frosting on, and Leah decided on chocolate. I can definitely live with that :-)

I planned to bake the cake late at night when it wouldn't be so hot, then decorate it the next day. Alas, I discovered Lost on Netflix, and the cake did not get baked when I'd planned. I did have a full day left to bake and decorate though, and had a lot of fun in the process.

I used recipes from King Arthur Flour for the cake and cream cheese frosting. I used an adapted Wilton American buttercream recipe for the decorations, as I was concerned with piping the cream cheese frosting.

King Arthur Flour (KAF) has a recipe section on their website, and within that a collection of recipes called Favorite Classics. These recipes are described as "KAF Guaranteed", and they are rock solid. KAF is not the only source of exhaustively tested recipes. America's Test Kitchen (which publishes Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country) is an obsessive tester, and I have also found very well tested recipes in Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible and Shirley Corriher's BakeWise.

What appeals to me in the KAF Guaranteed recipes is the predictability of their taste. Cooks Illustrated expects one to grind peanuts for the most peanuty Peanut Butter Cookies you can imagine, which are very good. KAF uses peanut butter alone, and you end up with cookies that taste as you expect them to, but better. I guess I'm saying that KAF recipes have a very broad appeal, which is exactly what I want as a starting point.

I made the simple Chocolate Cake. This recipe uses the paste or reverse creaming method, where the fat is mixed with the flour instead of being creamed with the sugar. I find it more predictable than creaming.

I used my digital scale to weigh the dry ingredients, which I highly recommend. I learned to measure like this in a bakery where I worked.

I put my mixer bowl on the scale and pressed the Tare button to set the weight to zero. This can also be called zeroing. I added the specified weight of flour, then pressed Tare again, and the scale was again reset to zero. I then measured the sugar right over the flour, and the scale only measured the amount of sugar I've added. I Tared the scale one more time, then added the cocoa.

I made a mistake here, and didn't sift my cocoa. My sifter is not really a sifter, but a fine mesh strainer, and my strainer was dirty. Cocoa, being a fine solid and a fat, clumps easily and persistent. It ended up being a lot of work to break up the cocoa with a whisk and my fingers, and I still would have done a better job with the sifter.

I added the leavening and salt and started the mixer with the whisk attachment to mix the dry ingredients. I then switched to the paddle and mixed in my very soft butter and oil.

I'd forgotten set my eggs out, so I put them in a bowl of hot water at this point. I put the bowl under a trickle of hot water from the tap to add some circulation.

I microwaved the milk for 60 seconds, which made it pretty hot, then added cold water from the refrigerator to bring the average temperature to lukewarm. Then I added the vanilla. I generally use artificial vanilla in baked goods and real vanilla extract in uncooked applications. All the liquid went in the mixer at once and was mixed. The eggs were then warm, so I added them as directed. Like many reverse-creamed cakes, the batter was very thin.

I prepared the pans with flour-oil spray and parchment rounds. The precut rounds are really handy if you're going to bake a lot of cakes.

The KAF recipe specifies the weight of the batter that goes in each pan, and it came out perfectly :-)

My father is very excited about the blog, so he bought me some Cake Strips (as well as the parchment rounds, and loaned me the cake pans. Thanks, Dad!). You can see how well they worked.

While the cakes cooled I made a double recipe of Cream Cheese Frosting. I learned in cake decorating class to always make more frosting than you think you will need. I mixed the room-temperature cream cheese to soften it, then mixed in the butter and real vanilla extract.

Based on my experience, I added the powdered sugar all at once. In my class we were told to buy 2 pound bags of Dominos pure powdered sugar, the amount needed for a double recipe of frosting, so we wouldn't have to measure. I started the mixer at the lowest speed to avoid recreating the set of Scarface (not that I've seen it), then increased the speed just a bit.

At this point the frosting looks terrible and my mixer is straining. I added milk, a tablespoon at a time, until it smoothed out.

I also made a buttercream, a recipe I will write about at another time.

To turn the cakes out of the pans, I put parchment circles on top of each cake, sandwiched the pan between two wire racks, and flipped them. I flipped them again and leveled the cakes. As noted before, they were already pretty level, but I wanted to be extra careful. Plus, the cake tops with some leftover frosting make a wonderful treat for the baker :-)

I spread some frosting on a 10-inch cake round to anchor the cake, and placed the first layer, cut side down. I frosted generously (it's all about the icing, remember?) then placed the second layer, again cut side down. I did this because it is almost impossible to frost the cut side of a cake without a lot of crumbs in the icing. After frosting the whole cake generously, I put it in the refrigerator to set.

I worked on the decorations next. I was planning to make some daffodils (thus the yellow), but I quickly learned that one should not try to make ambitious buttercream flowers in the dead of summer. So I went to my favorite and most successful flower, the rosette.

After I finished the rosettes I pulled the cake from the fridge and made handwriting guide lines with a pizza cutter, as well as a center line. I already knew from playing around that the middle of Happy Birthday falls in the middle of the first P and between the T and the H., so I started with those letters and worked out. Leah is a pretty easy name to center :-)

I placed the rosettes as evenly as I could and connected them with squiggles, then piped a simple line-and-dots bottom border.

Leah was happy with the cake AND she picked it up, so I didn't have to worry about delivering it without sliding!

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