Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream: An Exercise in Perseverance

August 5, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 16 Comments

Not the most attractive photo…

*** UPDATE: CLICK HERE FOR A NEW METHOD THAT ACTUALLY WORKS!!

** EDITED TO ADD: After having frosted the wedding cake using this frosting, I have to say that I do not recommend this recipe – it just plain did not work very well and was extremely hard to work with, unfortunately 🙁 I almost want to take down the recipe, but this was a pretty epic post and I’m kind of proud of it, so I’m going to leave it. The frosting tasted awesome (like liquid cheesecake – emphasis on the liquid) but it would not thicken up enough to spread easily; it would not un-curdle no matter how long I stirred it, chilled it, or left it at room temperature; and it was so soupy that I had to frost the cake in several coats, chilling between each coat to build up the frosting layer. And because it was curdled, it didn’t have a smooth finish (which was OK because the look of the wedding cake was kind of rustic, but it was still annoying). Bottom line: cream cheese has too much water in it to make a proper Swiss meringue buttercream, which relies on the high fat content in the butter to emulsify with the egg whites. If you’re looking for a cream cheese Swiss meringue buttercream frosting recipe, check out this one – it works around the cream cheese/high water content problem.**

Alternative titles for this post:

Zen and the Art of Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream

Testing Your Patience with Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream

How to Give Yourself Gray Hairs and an Anxiety Disorder

So. After the wedding cake trial I did a while back, I discerned that I needed to find a cream cheese frosting not made with confectioners’ sugar – more specifically, that I wanted to make a Swiss meringue buttercream frosting with cream cheese. A quick Google search turned up a recipe for Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream, and lo and behold, this very frosting had been used on a wedding cake! Double score!!

For those who don’t know, a Swiss meringue buttercream frosting is made by beating butter into a whipped meringue base of egg whites and sugar (heated to 140˚F to make them safe). I was a bit apprehensive at the thought of this, mostly because of the amount of egg whites that are required (being that I’m on a budget, and egg whites are more expensive than confectioners’ sugar). However, this frosting is seriously delicious – creamy, light, buttery, and not overly sweet; basically it blows any confectioners’ sugar frosting out of the water – so I was willing to overcome my initial qualms in favour of deliciousness. I had made Swiss meringue buttercream once before, back when I was in high school, and I don’t remember it being terribly difficult or onerous – I was only about 16, so it can’t have been *that* hard – but I had also read a few posts about how this type of frosting can be the most demoralizing endeavour because it just. won’t. come. together, and I knew I needed to do a test run.

I scaled down the recipe to use only 1 egg white and got down to business. A full 3 hours of beating/whisking/stirring later, I still had soupy, curdled glop (albeit delicious, cheesecake-flavoured glop). I was reluctant to give up, because this recipe and all others I had read tell you to just keep beating it and not lose hope – it will eventually work out. But I had to go to bed, so I declared this small test batch a failure. I did not, however, lose faith in the recipe or the method: I figured that the amount was too small, that the beaters of the KitchenAid weren’t able to get into the mixture far enough to really do anything, that it was just too hot in the kitchen and the butter and cream cheese were melting. I made plans for a second test run with a slightly larger batch.

At this point, I got a few tips from Jackie of Foodology, including a link to Sweetopolita’s post Swiss Meringue Buttercream Demystified. Reading this helped a lot, and introduced the idea of chilling the mixture when it gets too soupy. I started on the second test batch with renewed hope and things went marginally better – however it was really hot in the kitchen (mid-day at the end of July) so I had to alternate between bouts of chilling and beating the tar out of the frosting in the KitchenAid. And finally, over two hours later, it started to come together. Whew! Up until this point, I was planning on making the frosting in Vancouver, but now I decided I was going to make it beforehand and just refrigerate it, because if it didn’t come together when I needed it to, I would seriously lose it.

So, based on all I had learned, I made a larger batch (half of what I needed in total, to accommodate the size of my mixer), starting early in the morning to avoid the hot kitchen issue. You are supposed to let your butter/cream cheese come to room temperature, but I decided not to let either get too soft, thinking that the heat of the kitchen would be less of an issue that way. I whipped up the meringue, beat in the butter and cream cheese, and then set the mixer on high to do its thing. And two hours later, nothing. Still a curdled mess. I took the whisk attachment off the mixer and half-heartedly stirred at the frosting by hand a few times – and EUREKA! With slow stirring, the frosting somehow started to come together in a thick, fluffy mass. I put on the paddle attachment and turned the speed to low, and a (long) while later, I had proper frosting!! But seriously, it still took all bloody day. And I still had another batch to make.

But now I *finally* had it figured out. While the previous batch was going, I read this Swiss meringue buttercream tutorial and had two more epiphanies: 1) beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form; and 2) once the butter is added, stir on low speed with the paddle attachment. I had sort of figured this out for myself, but this was the first time I had actually read that SLOW SPEED was the important thing here (I don’t know if I just missed it in all the other tutorials I read, or what). The fourth time is apparently the charm, or maybe I was just used to it, because the frosting came together fine – but it still took over an hour of stirring!

If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering why the heck I went to all this trouble to make this particular frosting. The answer is that is it freaking delicious – it tastes just like cheesecake without being sickly sweet. Nate watched me make this frosting four times and thought I was crazy because of how long it was taking, but then when he tasted it, he said, “Now I know why you persevered.” It’s that good. So here is the recipe, along with all my tips for making it….

Cake for 60

August 3, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 233 Comments

My friend’s wedding is coming up this weekend, so the cakes were baked last week and are happily camping in the freezer, wrapped in plastic and tinfoil, awaiting transport to Vancouver in a few days. Baking the cakes was something I was a little worried about, despite the relative success of the trial run – would they bake evenly, would I have enough batter, would they taste good enough? Turns out all my fears were totally unfounded: the cakes turned out perfectly. They baked in flat, even layers (thanks so the wet towel/cake diaper trick) and they all baked in exactly 50 minutes, no matter which pan size. Even the big 10-inch baked evenly all the way to the middle without a heating core or anything.Remember the confidence I had in my math skillz when I calculated how much batter I would need and how I would need to scale the recipe? I was fairly sure that I would end up with just shy of the right amount of batter, but I got that part totally wrong: I ended up with about 2 cups of extra batter, which is definitely better than 2 cups too little! This meant that I got to use the extra batter to make these sweet little shell-cakes:I made one-and-a half times the recipe below and ended up with about 16 1/2 cups of batter, enough for two 10-inch, two 8-inch, and two 6-inch rounds, each 1 1/2 inches high when baked, plus a bunch of little shell cakes 😉 I mixed the batter in three batches (a half recipe each), then mixed them all together in one big bowl to make sure the batter was uniform. Some of the batter sat for quite a while because I could only bake two cakes at once, and I was concerned that the baking powder and baking soda would lose their leavening power before they hit the oven, but it didn’t seem to make any difference 🙂 Success!

Update: here’s my tutorial for how to frost and assemble the wedding cake from start to finish.

…

Eating Out in San Francisco, Part I: Lunch at the Zuni Café

July 29, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

My recent trip to Pacific Grove/Monterey, California, to visit my aunt and uncle contained horrific travel (delayed flights resulting in missed connections in both directions, leading to one miserable overnight in the San Francisco airport on the trip down and another 8 hour “layover” in the same airport on the way home. Plus the airline lost my luggage. A word of advice: don’t fly United!) and amazing restaurants. The day after I arrived, we drove up to San Francisco for a day of shopping (I needed a dress for the wedding I’m making the cake for ;)) and eating: we had lunch reservations at the Zuni Café, and dinner reservations at Millenium Restaurant. Both were highly anticipated, and I was pretty excited.The Zuni Café is an award winning restaurant that has been around since the late 1970s (in a slightly different incarnation than it is now, involving a Weber grill and espresso machine that also doubled as an element to scramble eggs on?!) and as such is pretty well-known (at least in the San Francisco food scene, of which I am not a part!). In addition to their focus on seasonal ingredients from sustainable sources, and one of the things the restaurant is known for is their wood-burning brick oven, which is smack-dab in the middle of their open kitchen. They bake their own bread in that oven, and they also do a whole roast chicken, served on top of a bread salad, which has a reputation for being awesome, which is why we ordered it. But I’m getting ahead of myself….

Daring Bakers: Fresh Fraisier

July 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 21 Comments

Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes was our July Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to make Fresh Frasiers inspired by recipes written by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson in the beautiful cookbook Tartine.

A fraisier is a French pastry consisting of two layers of cake soaked in simple syrup with strawberries and pastry cream sandwiched between. Essentially, it is a free-standing trifle, but the special thing about a fraisier is the exposed fruit around the sides. To make a true fraisier, you have to use strawberries (fraise = strawberry), so I’m not really sure what to call my strawberry-raspberry-blueberry combination – a baies mélanger-ier doesn’t really have the same ring to it. But whatever you want to call it, it was tasty!

I did this challenge while I was in California visiting my aunt and uncle, and it was extra challenging because I was baking in an unfamiliar kitchen and also contending with a wheat and corn allergy. But it turned out beautifully and just proves that you don’t need fancy equipment or lots of space to make a spectacular dessert. …

Dobos Torte Birthday Cake

July 21, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 8 Comments

I’m back from California, and after I recover from the travel part (which was horrendously awful) and get a chance to go through all the photos I took of food, I’ll have some posts about the awesome restaurants I visited in California… but in the meantime, you can hear all about my birthday cake 🙂

I turned 28 a few weeks ago, and it required a cake. Since baking is pretty much my favorite pass-time, I was more than happy to bake it myself – it meant I got exactly what I wanted and I also got to have the fun of doing it. I came across this recipe for Dobos Torte on Smitten Kitchen, where Deb had made it for her own recent birthday, and I immediately promised I’d make it for myself. So I did 😉…

Summer Salad Rolls with Peanut Sauce

June 30, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 12 Comments

Salad rolls are one of my favorite things to eat in the summer: fresh vegetables, delicious peanut sauce, and eating with my hands. I made a big plate of these for dinner and Nate and I ate them all (well, there’s one left). They are that good. If you’re not going to scarf down an entire plate for dinner, they make a great appetizer or potluck food!I used red pepper, mango, green onions, lightly steamed snow peas, shredded carrots, mint leaves, and imitation crab in these rolls, but you could put basically anything in them: steamed asparagus, bean sprouts, pea shoots, cucumber, avocado, lettuce, cilantro, basil leaves, cooked prawns, shrimp, or scallops, grilled chicken, pork, or beef (leftover steak would be delicious!)… The only ingredients that are not up for interpretation are the rice noodles and rice paper wrappers. I always eat salad rolls with peanut sauce and sweet chili sauce, but again, totally up to your own preference. I’ve included my favorite peanut sauce recipe – I could eat this stuff by the bowlful….

Daring Bakers: Baklava with Homemade Phyllo Pastry!

June 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 37 Comments

Erica of Erica’s Edibles was our host for the Daring Baker’s June challenge. Erica challenged us to be truly DARING by making homemade phyllo dough and then to use that homemade dough to make Baklava.

Did you read that? Homemade phyllo pastry… do you have any idea how thin that stuff is? It’s really really thin!!

Anyway. Baklava! I love it, but I’d never made it myself, so I was excited to give it a try. The challenge this month was in making the dough, and we could be as creative as we wanted with the baklava. I’ve had my eye on a cherry chocolate baklava recipe from Canadian Living for a long time, so I knew I wanted to try that flavour profile.I also wanted to do a more “traditional” one (based on the conversations in the Daring Bakers’ forums, there are many different traditional versions of baklava!), so I followed the suggested recipe and used walnuts, pistachios, and almonds.
And then, of course, I had to get creative with the shape. I did the traditional flavour in the traditional stacked layers, and the cherry chocolate one in a roll.I made a 9″x5″ pan of each kind – turns out that one pan would have been plenty! And after spending 3 HOURS rolling out enough dough for two half batches, it was definitely enough!! This was a fun challenge though, and making something like homemade phyllo is exactly why I joined the Daring Bakers – but be warned: it is very time-consuming! I’m pretty strong and I’m actually quite handy with a rolling pin, so it wasn’t a question of me being wussy or too weak to roll out the dough. The rolling plus the stretching just took forever! And now my hands feel bruised and I won’t need to do any push-ups for a week……

Really Easy Crepes, aka “Leathery Pancakes”

June 23, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 7 Comments

I was in Vancouver overnight last week to see “Wicked” with some friends, and the next morning we went out for crepes for breakfast. They reminded me of the crepes my Mum used to make, only she called them “leathery pancakes”, because… well, they are kind of thin and leathery.

Edited to add a comment from my Mum about the origins of “leathery pancakes”: “[They are] actually from my own childhood. My mum/your Nana actually coined the name after our Swedish babysitter Mrs. Solberg made them for us when my parents were away one time and us kids raved about them. I guess “leathery” came about because they don’t rise like Mum’s regular Scotch pancakes did and we used to have them either with butter/brown sugar/lemon juice or butter/sour cream/brown sugar.” Thanks, Mum 🙂

Anyway, there was no real recipe, it was just more a matter of mixing together an egg, some milk, and some flour until the batter was the right consistency, and then cooking them in a hot, non-stick pan (the non-stick part is important!). These “leathery pancakes” were one of the things I made for myself all the time when I was younger – I’d usually eat them with butter and maple syrup, and sometimes I’d roll them around some kind of savoury filling. At the crepe place in Vancouver, the crepes were spread with whatever filling you wanted, sweet or savoury, and served folded in quarters. I had one with ham, cheese, and egg, plus a Nutella one for dessert (I’m totally OK with having dessert at breakfast!). Unfortunately, I don’t have any Nutella in the house, so I had to make do with butter, brown sugar, lemon juice, and strawberries for a sweet filling, and ham and cheese for savoury. Really good, and really easy. This amount of batter makes just enough for two 12-inch crepes – enough for one person if you’re hungry, or two people if you feel like sharing 😉…

If you have a chocolate craving…

June 21, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

… these chocolate-mocha-nut cookies will satisfy it. And if you’re like me, you crave chocolate on a near-daily basis. (This is why I exercise every day!) I was reminded of the awesomeness that are these cookies the last time I was on Salt Spring and Lynette’s mum, Elaine (of banana bread fame), made them… and I knew I had to make them myself, and soon! Luckily I already had the recipe, it just took me nearly two weeks to get my act together and actually make them! But the wait was worth it. They are SO GOOD.These cookies are super chocolatey, with a chewy, fudgy texture, a good hit of mocha, and a nice crunch from the nuts. One batch gave me 18 large cookies, and they barely lasted past the first day. Seriously, if they last longer in your house, I take my hat off to you and your iron-clad will power!The original recipe calls for walnuts, but I’ve had these cookies with almonds, and I made mine with pecans, so use whatever you prefer. The only changes I made to Elaine’s recipe were to toast the nuts and reduce the sugar by a little bit. I used chopped chocolate because I had a massive bar of dark chocolate in my baking cupboard, but chocolate chips are fine too. Now go make these!…

Amazing Struesel-Topped Muffins

June 14, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

These muffins are so good I made them twice. Once for myself, and again the next day for my friend Heather, who just had a baby girl. For the last seven and a half months of her pregnancy, Heather was sick every single day, and obviously had a really hard time eating anything. This would be my own personal hell. Thankfully, now that the baby is out, she can actually enjoy eating again. I visited her and baby Zephyra on the weekend, and when Heather told me to “bring food!” I was more than happy to oblige with these muffins.

The original recipe from Smitten Kitchen is for rhubarb struesel muffins, and I came across it about a week after I posted the recipe for strawberry rhubarb coffee cake made with whole wheat pastry flour – I had been dreaming of a muffin incarnation, and then this recipe appeared, using whole wheat pastry flour to boot! The first time I made them I used (frozen) rhubarb, and they were delicious: not too sweet, with a delicate, springy texture, a crunchy golden struesel layer on top, and a good tang from the rhubarb. Not to mention the fact that they smelled HEAVENLY while baking. The second time around, I used fresh strawberries and frozen blueberries, because Heather has two older kids and I figured berries might be more kid-friendly than slightly sour rhubarb. I also played around with yogurt instead of sour cream, and switched it up with the flours, using a combination of whole wheat and all purpose in place of whole wheat pastry flour. Both times, they came out perfectly, and I think I may have found my new favorite muffin recipe. I’m fairly confident that you could put any kind of fruit in these – fresh or frozen – and they would be fantastic. Thank you Deb at Smitten Kitchen for this recipe!!…