Carrot cake is overrated. The carrot bits and the lumpy pineapple or whatever ingredients that have been added to its recipe have never impressed me. The icing or frosting was another matter. Cream cheese frosting is without or nearly without equal as the penultimate of cake coatings. Carrot cake is merely the incidental surface for holding cream cheese frosting. Let’s face it, you could cover a saltine with cream cheese frosting and it would be delicious.
I grew up in a household that revered frosted cakes. Idiosyncratic Brits in so many ways, my mother and grandmother used the term icing to describe the filling and covering of layer cakes. In our house butter cream was the icing of choice. My grandmother was the baker in our house. She schooled me in the basics of cake baking and decorating from an early age. I can remember standing on a little stool that had the words “Mary had a little lamb”…only the b in lamb had worn off …and learning the recipe for a two layer cake and butter cream icing. I use the word butter loosely since there was no butter in her recipe. This was the post WWII era when the lessons from the depression and war rationing still guided our cautious use of foods. For example, no cake could have more than two eggs in its ingredients and butter for us was a plastic packet of a slippery white substance that was colored yellow by breaking a bubble containing an orange dye incorporated in the plastic covering. The four kids vied for the honor of hand massaging that little bubble to turn the oleaginous substance into what we called margarine. We lived a much simpler life than kids do today.
There were only three ingredients in our icing, margarine, 10X sugar and vanilla. My grandmother never measured and most of the time the icing was perfect. If it became too stiff to spread, she would add a bit of milk (a mixture of cow’s milk and dried milk and water.) On special occasions, some of the 10X sugar was replaced with cocoa. And, for most of my adult life, this was the recipe that I used.
It was about a month ago that I volunteered to make a cake for the Sunday birthday party for my youngest grandsons. Their preference for frosting required that it be thick and colored yellow, pink and blue. Not a problem. I baked the cake early on a Saturday evening. I waited for it to cool enough to frost and gathered the ingredients. At first, I thought it would be a cream cheese confection, but, alas, I had no cream cheese. My grandmother’s recipe was always good. So, it would be a butter cream, with real butter, vanilla and 10X sugar. That soon became a challenge. There was only about a cup of confectioners’ sugar in the jar and it was now mid-Saturday night. What stores were open then? Did I want to drive to Camillus or Skaneateles to get the sugar? I don’t do well driving at night anymore, so what to do? As my experience for implementing a changed lesson plan taught me, “Monitor and adjust.”
Google directed me to something called Ermine frosting. No 10X sugar needed. It was more like a pudding. At first, I questioned whether it would do the trick but at this hour my options were few. The recipe is as follows:
Mix 2 cups of sugar, ½ cup of flour and a pinch of salt in a medium saucepan.
Add 2 cups of milk mixed with 2 tsp. vanilla.
Stir to combine and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until it reaches a pudding-like consistency (about 2 minutes).
Pour into a bowl, cover with some plastic wrap to prevent a skin from forming and cool to room temperature.
Using a mixer, beat 2 cups of unsalted butter at room temperature on high until pale and fluffy (about 3 minutes).
Add the room temperature pudding mixture 1 Tablespoon at a time while the mixer continues to beat the butter.
Beat after all of the pudding is added for two more minutes until it is smooth and fluffy.
I was skeptical. What would this look and taste like? I had a discerning audience to please.
I frosted the cake and added the required sprinkles. Grandmothers might run out of confectioner’s sugar but they never run out of sprinkles.
Sure, it took a lot more work than a butter cream, but it did the job well. It looked good and it tasted great. The frosting was delicious. My grandsons, all of them, the 3 year old twins and the two teens, gobbled the cake and its covering down. The left-over cake went home with the older two.
So, what has my life come to?
There are wars in Europe and the middle east, famine in the Sudan, the suspicious shortage of weight loss drugs, the incorrect use of commas and so much more to worry about. While the world is pondering far more important challenges, I find myself satisfied that I was able to frost a cake. There are challenges and there are solutions. Some are sweeter than others.
