In Which I Finally Conquer Homemade Frosting

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It's been a while since the last TusHousehold update, and I thought finally making adequate homemade icing was worth a blog post. So what's happened lately?

Everdry has come back to our house to fix a couple of things, and I think they'll probably be back again. 112-year-old never-worked-on basements probably present a bit more of a challenge; I'm just glad the money we paid them ensures that they take care of this house forever. Not to mention the foreman cleaned our entire basement floor when he was here!! He saved Wil and me a weekend of scrubbing and I love that.


This past weekend Dave and Lynn came to visit! It was great to tool around Milwaukee with them. We hit up the natural history museum (we're members now! we're going to learn so much natural history!!), ate the best Greek food in the city, and met the Bronze Fonz. Kaiser also somehow cut up his nose while we were out. No idea how he did it, but he doesn't seem all that upset, as evidenced by the picture below. Poor baby :(


To balance that out, enjoy this picture of Kaiser helping me make the bed...


On to my biggest success in a long time: Swiss meringue buttercream! I highly recommend the video (and associated comments) from which I learned how to do this because it was a lifesaver.

Based on some comments, I made half the recipe: 3 egg whites (NO YOLK. seriously. not even a little or it's ruined.), 3/4 c. sugar, 2 sticks of butter at room temp, and a touch of vanilla. I also had a little lemon juice to add since I made lemon-blueberry cupcakes. I frosted 16 cupcakes with this batch of icing.


In your very clean stand mixer bowl, with your whisk attachment, mix the sugar and egg whites by hand over a boiling pot of water until the sugar is totally dissolved. If you're not sure when that is, just pinch your fingers in there - if it's grainy when you rub your fingers together, the sugar isn't dissolved. 


Then you whip it (whip it good). Put the bowl in your mixer and whisk on high speed for roughly 7 minutes. It'll look glossy and beautiful and will taste exactly like marshmallow creme. Make sure the meringue is cool before you go on...while I was whisking, I held ice packs against the side of the bowl :D Swap out the whisk for the paddle attachment, turn the mixer to medium-low, and add your butter in small chunks. 


One of the comments I saw most often was that the buttercream looked curdled or separated, which happens because the butter was too warm or the meringue hadn't cooled enough. As the Brits on Bake Off would say, whack it in the fridge for 10 minutes! Mine looked fine until I added the lemon juice and vanilla, so I did just that and it seemed to work.

After adding the butter and maybe some vanilla, turn the mixer to low and mix until you've knocked the air out and it looks glossy. Then frost away! Turns out Wil is way better at this than me ;)


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