Pre-Established Perfection

Awhile back, a major element of this journey was established: the perfect frosting. And holy cow is it good.

The Italian Meringue Butter Cream found in Cake Love is pure perfection and let me break down why.

Consistency
When properly created, this frosting is stiff enough to hold its shape when piped onto either a cupcake or cake, yet buttery enough to capture that perfect "melt in your mouth" deliciousness that a good butter cream should.
Frostability
This recipe for frosting is super easy to pipe. Not so thick that you are squeezing the living daylights out of your piper of choice (classic bag or newfangled mechanical) and not so thin that it just kind of goops out. 
Buildability
Suggestions are given in the cookbook for ways to alter flavor and taste of the frosting and they are definitely a good start. However, what is awesome about the base of the frosting recipe is that it gives you a solid foundation to expand some creative thinking and come up with your own experimentation.
Taste
I have never made a frosting recipe with a base of powdered sugar and enjoyed it. Because of the too sweet taste of powdered sugar frosting, I long maintained that canned frosting was good enough. But then....I made this one and realized that this actually beats out canned frosting. By quite a bit of yardage. Not too sweet, right amount of buttery love this frosting tastes a-mazing.


It took me a couple of times to really understand the zen of creating this frosting as it can be a little tricky perfecting the meringue portion of the recipe. Where I really struggled the first couple of times was beating the four sticks of butter in enough so that there weren't any surprise tablespoon chunks of butter spread on my cake.

So, since it has been established that this is indeed the best frosting base the journey of frosting in this blog will be the new creation of different flavors to go along with the frosting base and honing in on the perfect concoction to get each desired flavor.