Funfetti-tastic!

You may be catching onto a pattern here... I like to make birthday cakes. Well, I like to make any cakes, really. But birthdays give me such a handy excuse to make a cake. This time, it's Amanda's. And her requested flavor of cake? Funfetti! So that's what I made (from scratch, of course).

The cake turned out beautifully. Three layers of fluffy white cake, sprinkled through with colorful dots.



The icing, however, turned out to be a debacle and a half. I found a recipe for Italian Meringue Buttercream, which I thought sounded amazing. I had made a Swiss Meringue Buttercream before that I absolutely loved, so I thought this would be perfect. Boy was I wrong. Everything was going along just fine, right up until I added the vanilla. Then my beautiful smooth icing began curdling right before my eyes. From vanilla! I was shocked. I was appalled. I wanted to cry. (I had been having a bad run with icing as it was before this...) I thought maybe, just maybe, it was because it was too warm (the end of summer, warm kitchen from baking the cake), so I thought I'd throw the bowl in the fridge overnight, then whip out the lumps in the morning. To my dismay, those curds were not going to smooth out, no matter how long I beat them. Even after consulting others, I still can't figure out what went wrong.

So now on to plan B: good old fashioned buttercream. But regular buttercream is rather yellow, due to the butter. This simply would not due for my perfect white cake that was supposed to have a perfect white frosting. So on to plan C: fake buttercream. Which required another trip to the store (without a car, so walking in the morning heat). Get there, gather my ingredients, get home...find that somehow, the cashier managed to leave out my butter extract. What?? How do you have buttercream frosting without butter flavoring?? As it was, I didn't have time to make it back to the store (nor did I have the patience) if I wanted to get a crumb coat set on the cake before icing it. So I had to make do with just the vanilla and almond. The result was indeed beautifully white, and tasted rather like Oreo-cooking filling. And even after all my frosting issues, the final product was, if I do say so myself, quite a cute little cake.



Oh, and what to do with all the leftover frosting that happens to taste like Oreo cream? Why, make (giant) homemade Oreos, of course!