Grandma's Birthday

So it was grandma H's birthday on Saturday. We were very excited for another birthday and not sure what to do for her. During a get together last Sunday we decided to do something special for her this time. We came up with a plan to schedule a massage for her and get her some flowers. I also volunteered to make a cake for her. So the massage got scheduled and my sister-in-law picked up the flowers.

I have been wanting to make the real buttercream frosting and I thought it was a prefect time for it. Definitely worth some extra effort. I little while ago I recorded the show Good Eats where Alton Brown showed me just how to make the frosting. So I put all the stuff together that I needed and set the butter out several hours before hand to soften.

I started at probably 7:00 on Friday night. I had already made the cake and put it in the freezer, so that was ready. I boiled the sugar and dark karo syrup, beat the eggs in the mixer( took a little while because the eggs would not foam up), and then I poured the sugar mixture in the eggs slowly with a spoon. I got a little too much of it on the beaters and the side but it did mix together ok after about 5 min of mixing. So I kept rewatching the buttercream show and still messed up by not waiting long enough for the mixture to cool down before I started putting in the butter a table spoon at a time. Now this was very wrong because it turned into a soupy mess. I didn't know how to make it thicker so I just kept letting it mix and mix until the butter was curdled completely separated from the liquid. Dumb mistake since I had decided to make a double batch and just wasted 8 eggs and 5 sticks of butter. This is what it looked like after putting it into a bowl.

I couldn't do anything with that.

Then I tryed it again. I pulled out another bowl and my hand mixer, then set out more butter and eggs. I waited at least an hour before trying it a second time. I boiled the sugar, mixed the eggs to a foam and started to very slowly add in the sugar. It started out ok but I let the beaters hit the sugar mixture too much and it hardened to the beaters. The eggs started flying out of the bowl in every direction. I stop mixing and felt inside the egg mixture. There were huge clumps of hard sugar and my dinky whisk beater was all spiky.

This is what it looked like.

I was done with that batch at that point. I put the kids to bed and went to the computer to figure what I did wrong. I found a different recipe and read through it a couple times. I was not going to give up. I had to make it no matter what, even if I had to start it at 11:00 at night.

I pulled out the stuff for the new recipe and got going right away. I boiled the sugar, whipped the eggs and slowly poured in the sugar mixture making sure not to hit the beaters. Then I had to let the mixture cool down for an hour. I got to the point to where it was only a little warm on the bottom so I started mixing in the butter. I tried going very slow with this as well. It was looking fine all the way through but it was still pretty soupy looking. I let it sit and stir for a while until finally it thickened. Well, It didn't get too thick but thick enough to frost a cake.

I pulled out the cake from the freezer, plopped on a raspberry filling in two of the layers and for the middle layer I put some butter cream. Then I frosted the outside after mixing in some extra powdered sugar to try and thicken it a bit more. It went on pretty well. I did a simple shell design around the top and bottom of the cake and with this new really cool chocolate and cinnamon grinder, ground on a little color.

I cut some flowers from my mothers house for the finishing effect. I like how it ended up looking was glad to give it to grandma H.

Hope you had a great birthday Grandma.