Italian Buttercream

I finally purchased a stand mixer. Don't be jealous, but I found it on Craig's List; a KitchenAid, brand new, in the box, for $140. Yay for that!

I've been waiting for this lovely machine to try my hand at Italian and French butterceam recipes as you need eggs/egg whites whipping as you slowly drizzle in a hot sugar syrup. I wanted to try Italian first as I have never tasted it. I used Martha Stewart's Grand Marnier Italian Buttercream recipe, but omitted the Grand Marnier - this time around anyway.

Meringue style frosting is a lot more involved than your run of the mill butter and powdered sugar frosting (American buttercream). I had two to three things going at the same time.

Here's my stand mixer working at the egg whites with sugar syrup and my hand mixer getting ready to go at the butter.

This buttercream is wonderful. If you like whipped cream or meringue kind of flavor and texture this is the buttercream for you. My hubby, who likes more of a whipped cream frosting rather than a buttery one loved this. Funny as there is more butter in this recipe than in your basic American buttercream. A friend of mine thought it was a lot like a cream puff filling. Might have to tackle cream puffs next - or better yet, make a cream puff cupcake.

While the frosting recipe was the star of this show, I still wanted to try a new cake. I went with a basic vanilla cake from BHG. This recipe is on my favorites list. It's almost biscuit-like. The texture is nice and dense just like I like. The cake went great with the frosting, but a little too boring for me.

Because I had so much Italian buttercream left over (the recipe makes a huge batch) I tried another cupcake a few days later. I was worried about the frosting and read up online. It will keep 3 to 5 days. I stored it in my fridge in an airtight container, brought it back to room temperature and re-whipped it in my stand mixer. It was like the day I made it.

So the second cake I made was part of a recipe for a lemon meringue pie cupcake (again from BHG). I followed the recipe for the baking of the cakes, but went in my own direction by filling each cupcake with lemon curd and topping with my Italian buttercream.

The original recipe had you just add a small dollop of curd on top of each cake and then top with real meringue.

My one gripe about this cupcake recipe is the consistency. No matter how much I baked them (I nearly over-baked them) the tops were left a little mushy - like they weren't cooked. The flavor, however, was great. The finished cupcake reminded me of a piece of lemon meringue pie with less lemon tang. Maybe a homemade curd instead of a store bought one would have helped. I wish I could have been more creative with decorating the cakes. I wasn't feeling inspired so I kept it simple.