[Sca-cooks] victoria sandwich cake/butter icing

[Pixel, Queen of Cats]

On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, Philip & Susan Troy wrote:

> Hrolf Douglasson wrote:
> >
> > English butter icing doesn't have eggs in it....just sugar,butter and
> > flavouring
> > vara
>
> True. The French buttercream I described, however, and the Swiss
> buttercream involving the hot syrup, described but not named as Swiss,
> although that is what it is, do contain eggs.
>
> Adamantius


Adding eggs to buttercream, whether you cook them with hot sugar syrup or
not, adds depth and richness and a bit of stability to buttercream. The
butter/sugar/flavor variety is, well, not the best choice if you are going
to be dealing with a lot of decoration or if the cake is going to be
anywhere where the ambient temperature is enough to cause butter to soften
at all substantially. <gasp> The heat from your hands will melt the
buttercream as you pipe, or your decorations will soften and fall
off. All-butter buttercream is also not white, and requires either adding
whitener or using something else that is actually white, if you want a
true white cake.

My late grandfather's decorator buttercream was more of a French style,
with *shudder* Crisco or other solid vegetable fat added for more
reliability. The kind advocated by the Wilton folks (major cake decorating
business) is pretty much Crisco and powdered sugar, which is remarkably
like the filling inside an Oreo, and why I won't eat either (or any
icing/frosting I have not been involved with the making of in some
way). It is quite temperature-insensitive and it keeps for months in the
fridge if you are the sort to want to randomly practice piping daylilies
on the spur of the moment.

In case anybody was interested.

Margaret, who is waiting for it to be after Pennsic so she might have time
to play with buttercream again