Beautifully Basic Buttercream

The other night, Hubby told me that a colleague of his was looking for a buttercream recipe.  Rather than referring him to one of our posts that includes a recipe for buttercream, I decided it deserves a post of its own.  The truth is, there are lots of different kinds of buttercream.  The one I’m making today is foolproof (even in May), reliable, delicious, and perfect for either piping or spreading. 

Here’s what you’ll need:

• ½ cup butter, softened (1 stick)
• 2 cups powdered sugar (that’s icing sugar for you non-Americans)
• 1 Tablespoon vanilla
• 2-3 Tablespoons cream
• ¼ teaspoon salt (optional)

An important note to make is that your buttercream can only be as good as the individual ingredients you use.  Good quality butter, organic powdered sugar, and pure vanilla extract are a must.  I can’t stress enough just how important it is.  If you’re going to use crap ingredients, you might as well save yourself the trouble and just buy the stuff that comes in a tub.  If you’ve never used organic powdered sugar, give it a try one time.  You won’t believe the difference.  Trader Joe’s is a really good source for stuff like that. 

Ok, rant over. Let’s get started.  Drop the room temperature butter into your mixing bowl and give it a quick stir, just to make sure it’s nice and soft. 

Sift the powdered sugar over the top. 

This is another thing that makes a difference.  All powdered sugar is going to have at least a few lumps in it.  Sifting it will make your icing nice and smooth.  Break up any lumps with your fingertips or the back of a spoon and put them through the sieve. 

Mix on low speed until you have what is basically a crumbly mess.  This is when you want to scrape down the bowl really well.  If you have a dough scraper, they work great for this because they’re stiffer than a silicone spatula. 

Once everything is scraped down thoroughly, mix on medium- low speed until you have something about the consistency of play dough. 

Add the vanilla.  If you want your buttercream to be a different flavor, (mint, almond, whatever) feel free to substitute it for some or all of the vanilla.  (this is also when you would add coloring if you’re doing that)     

Mix that in until it is completely incorporated.  Be sure to continue to scrape everything down. 

Add 2 Tablespoons of heavy cream,  

and give it a mix until it looks well… beautiful!

Now’s the time to check for consistency and flavor.  If you want it to be thinner, add a little more cream.  I wanted salt in mine, so I added ¼ teaspoon. 

Give it one more stir and you have reached buttercream perfection! 

Spread it on a cake or pipe it onto your favorite cupcake. 

If you drop your cupcakes back into the pan, they can’t run away from you while you’re piping.  There are two easy designs for topping cupcakes.  The first is a spiral that has a point in the middle. To accomplish this, use a large open star tip, hold your bag straight up and down, and starting from the outside edge, work your way around, slowly moving toward the center. 

The second is a rosette.  It’s exactly the same technique, except you start in the middle, and work your way toward the edge.  Either way is beautiful!

Repeat with the rest of the cupcakes.  There should be plenty of frosting for a dozen. 

What recipe would you like to see us feature?  Don’t be shy.  Requests are not a nuisance.  We actually love getting them.  Not only do they give us inspiration for posts, but they help us to know what kinds of things our audience is interested in.  So feel free to ask questions or make requests anytime, even if it is completely unrelated to the post.    

Pear Mayhem!

Oh, it's Mayhem alright.

I bought a bag of pears a little while ago and they are delicious and just the right size for taking to lunch for afternoon snacks, but the trouble with a whole bag of pears is that they all ripen at the same time. And then you have a bag of super-ripe pears and way more afternoon snacks than one person can eat in three days.

Fortunately, you also need something to take for breakfast. Or eat at home for breakfast. Or dessert. But really, this is more of a breakfast cake.

Cake for breakfast! Mayhem!

Oh, and once again, I'm winging it. Because, I laugh in the face of Mayhem!

It laughed back at me.

Pear Upside Down Cake

• 3-4 pears
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 1/2 cup brown sugar

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 pears, grated

Preheat the oven to 350 and bring all the ingredients to room temperature. 

Butter and line an 8 inch square pan with parchment.

Pour the melted butter into the pan, sprinkle over the sugar, and lay in the pears. If you plan on presenting this for some kind of fancy breakfast, you could arrange the pears artfully. Me, I wanted to use as many as possible, so I crammed 4 pears into the bottom of the pan.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the eggs.

If you ever get eggshell in your batter, the best thing to take it out is another eggshell.

Beat in the eggs, and then the ginger and the milk.

Mix in the dry ingredients. If you'd like to sift the baking powder and baking soda into the flour first, go right ahead, but this is a quick cake, and if you just give the dry stuff a bit of a stir as it sits on top of the wet before mixing the two together, that's just fine.

If the pears you're grating in aren't super ripe and juicy, you may want to add anothe 1/4 cup of milk or pear juice. However, I recommend using ridiculously ripe pears.

Pears seem to be classed as a "hard" fruit most of the time, treated much like apples are, but a nice ripe pear is not crisp like an apple is. A perfectly ripe pear will crush in your hand the same way a peach does.

Mix in the pears and spread the batter over the sliced ones on the bottom of the pan.

Hm. That's a really full pan.

I however, am not anywhere near as smart as Taneasha, and I didn't put mine onto a baking sheet.

Instead I popped the pan in the oven and set the timer for 40 minutes.

10 minutes later, the cake started sending me smoke signals out of the vent. I opened the oven. And then I opened every window in my apartment and the front door.

The sugar at the bottom of the pan had bubbled up and overflowed onto the bottom of the oven.

I yanked the cake and put it on a sheet covered with parchment, then shoved it back into the oven.

I had to vent the smoke every few minutes for the next 15 minutes, but eventually it cleared.

I've been thinking for a while that I should clean the oven. I guess I really have to now.

Um, okay, apparently rising was not an issue this time.

Crap, I'm supposed to flip this thing upside down to let the pears out.

A bread knife, horizontal, and that wacky peak is taken care of. This trick works well for levelling out the bottom half of a layer cake too.

And since I don't have a square plate, or a round platter big enough for this thing, and since I need something to store it in, I flipped it into my 9 inch square Corningware pan.

Nailed it.

I'll just trim the edge off to make it fit.

The taste of this is just fabulous. I know there's nothing in there but ginger, but that's the point. The ginger gives the soft cake a nice bite that perfectly offsets the smooth pear.

And the caramel! Holy cow.

I think next time I may add a bit of ginger to the sugar-butter mixture that makes up the caramel.

What would you add ginger to?