I did not like icing, but after being “corrupted” by my American husband, I’m learning that icing can be really delicious. Well, at least home-made icing- there is still much lazy, yucky icing out there.
So my latest baking attempt produced a chocolate mint icing cocoa-butter cake, and an orange icing butter cake.
The cake base is not worth bragging about- since it’s pretty much following the instructions on the Betty Crocker mix. BUT, what’s worth sharing though is that you can totally make it with ¼ less the required butter, and it still taste fabulous! And I have fallen in love with this soft butter sponge as well- not too buttery, light and fluffy and melts in your mouth.
The icing was where it became fun. Arthur helped make the base with a simple family buttercream recipe. He left me with this big bowl of icing and said, “make it interesting, it’s boring!” So my mind started ticking as my eyes roved around the kitchen. And 1 flavor of icing is no fun- let’s up the game a little!
Ok, there’s some chocolate bars that I want to get rid of, and there’s this peppermint extract that I bought some time back that I have not tried. Chocolate mint icing sounded pretty good in my mind.. So there I was, without a recipe and trying to concoct this icing with my gut-feel proportions. Let’s just say that there was a lot of experimentation, “oops”, and “ok.. let’s add a little bit more of this to fix that”..
Whilst I back-tracked in the school of “measuring”, I thought I did well in the school of “melting chocolate”. It’s so satisfying to see the melted chocolate in the micro-wave looking as it should. :p A smooth silky chocolate ribbon falling from the spoon... Pretty... In the past, I used to get lumpy dry chocolate. I learnt later that it was because the temperature was too high. You cannot get impatient there with melting chocolate. Higher heat does not mean faster melting :p That’s something I learnt after screwing up goodness-knows-how-many bags of chocolate chips, and "getting mad" at the cookbooks.. heh.
By the time the chocolate mint icing was done, I was a little tired. What do I do with the other half of the buttercream icing?
And I remembered seeing this Orange icing on the internet the other day… Idea! But me being the lazy cook, I wasn’t going to go search for the recipe on the internet-since I was not prepared to do what it says anyway.. I saw my Korean KamQuat drink on the shelf and decided to “give it a shot”. So I took spoonfuls of the drink preserves, and stirred it into the buttercream icing. Again, “by feel”, I arrived at a perfect tasting orange icing. It’s really delicious.
At the end of the evening, I really enjoyed the 2 batches of icing and was really pleased at how they turned out. I could totally make icing for a living!! I don’t understand.. When it’s so easy to get creative flavors, why is there still so much bad icing out there??
And who says icing on the cake is not important? It can give 2 plain butter cakes such distinctive taste, and the cake “springs alive”!
Maybe when I get back to Singapore, I can have my little home bakery with specialty-flavored icing on cup-cakes. Hmmm… Idea.. Next career maybe? Icing queen? Hahahaha…
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