Chose between a $35 pre made fondant cake and baking my mom's birthday cake from scratch, and I want a do over | Baking Fails And Wins - Babble Community
Chose between a $35 pre made fondant cake and baking my mom's birthday cake from scratch, and I want a do over
My mom turned 60 last Saturday and I had exactly one day off to get her cake done, so I stood in the store aisle for 20 minutes weighing a plain $35 sheet cake with fondant flowers against doing her old chocolate recipe from scratch. I picked scratch because the whole family talks about that recipe, but I rushed the buttercream and it split on me around 9 pm. I tried to save it with warm milk, then cold milk, then more powdered sugar, and it just got soupier each time. By 11 pm I was spreading grainy chocolate sludge over a cake that was still warm in the middle, so the whole top slid off into the box. We ate it out of bowls with spoons and my mom laughed, but I stood in my kitchen at midnight scraping frosting off the counter and seriously wished I had spent the $35. Has anyone saved a split buttercream without starting the whole batch over, and does the cold bowl trick actually work or is it a myth?
The "cold bowl trick" is real, my friend swears by it. Her buttercream split on a hot day and she stuck the bowl in an ice bath for like 10 minutes while beating it, and it came back together. Warm milk just makes it worse, so you were fighting a losing battle there.