Episodes 6-3 and 6-4 – Chocolate Swiss Buttercream and Lavender Inlay

June 26, 2010
Episodes 6-3 and 6-4
Chocolate Swiss Buttercream and Lavender Inlay

First off, the episodes are in the wrong order and it didn’t really hit me until I finished… oh wait I made the buttercream and I made the inlay.  That’s important to know because the inlay has to cool before you can use it.  Sorry for the confusion!

Inlay is just I fun word I use instead of throwing pastry cream all over the place.  When you write menus and talk about food in the written language you want to avoid saying the same thing over and over again if you can.  The number one over-used word in menu writing is actually the word “with” and my recipe page is pretty guilty of that too.  The less often you use the word with when it comes to food the more creative you’ll sound.

Okay, now the buttercream I’ll have to admit was pretty rough.  I typically only make Italian buttercream at home because I love it.  I haven’t made swiss buttercream in ages – and chocolate buttercream even less often – so this episode was a learning experience for me too!  In school we did in fact add ganache to buttercream to make it chocolate but after trying to ice with the batch I made in this episode I quickly realized that it probably wasn’t such a good idea.  It made the buttercream really runny, almost like trying to ice with water, and it wasn’t sticking to itself or the cake.  As you’ll see the 10″ round in the next episode was fairly easy to decorate but, through some creative editing, you guys won’t see the nightmare it was to decorate the 4″ round or the 6″ square.  Now another factor that may have contributed was the fact that I didn’t take the temperature of the egg whites in making swiss meringue.  We didn’t in school and we didn’t really have a problem but I’m a pastry chef and I’m trying to show people how to make this stuff at home so I really should be using less subjective ways of making the recipes.  So, as I note in captions in the video, heat the egg whites while constantly stirring to 120 degrees F.  This will evaporate more water and ensure a higher quality swiss meringue which means a less runny buttercream after all.  The other factor would be the shortening.  Now this could be to a very small degree but seeing as I’ve never had problems with a buttercream made entirely of butter, I just added the amount of shortening back into the butter.  Now American buttercream (aka American grease-cream) is made entirely of shortening (shortening+powdered sugar in fact) so it essence shortening shouldn’t have played a huge role in making my icing runny.  It’s up to you if you would like to use shortening – the recipe originally calls for 7 1/2 oz.  Now to replace the ganache I had a conversation with cake mama (aka Sallee over at Fran’s Cake and Candy) and she recommended just using straight cocoa powder by the tablespoon – approximately 3 tablespoons per pound of buttercream.  Like powdered sugar, cocoa powder will help stiffen up the icing (while conversely ganache will do the opposite).  Add the cocoa powder one or two tablespoons at a time and make sure to test the icing after each addition of cocoa powder.  You want a creamy consistency and a sweet taste – too much cocoa powder could make it pasty, grainy, and bitter.  Also, make sure you sift the cocoa powder first – this will guarantee no lumps!

I apologize for jumping into this demo video with practicing it first but I was really excited to make a three-tiered cake and to show everyone how easy it really is!  The next episode where I cover the cake with fondant is also not the best technique (I’ll explain in that blog post) so I’ve actually signed up for a class over at Fran’s Cake and Candy to help refresh my cake making skills.  This weekend I’ll demo a video how to cover a dummy cake in fondant using the proper technique.  If after watching the video and I just deem the whole thing unusable, I’ll just post the assembly of the cake itself and I’ll reference the vanilla chiffon genoise decorating for the icing method (as it’s relatively the same, yes even for the square since it’s so small) and the covering a dummy in fondant episode for the rolled fondant method.

Anyway, enough of things that haven’t even been posted yet!  Here is the recipe for the lavender inlay and the corrected recipe for the Chocolate Swiss Buttercream.  On to the videos~