Frosting Archives | Tasty Oasis

Snickerdoodle Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Cinnamon Frosting

February 17, 2015 By Karen

Becoming a parent is one of the biggest leaps of faith out there, and Friday marked four years since I crossed that threshold for the second time. When you make that decision, you’re filled with dreams. Dreams of who your child will be, and what your family will look like. It doesn’t matter if you become a parent by birth, by adoption, or by marriage, because all the hopes are the same. You want your kid to be healthy. First and foremost, that’s what everyone says.

So what happens when things don’t go according to plan? My little guy was a preemie, and I’ll never forget the panic I felt when I knew he was coming six weeks early. The heartbreak I had when the nurses in the NICU told me I couldn’t hold him yet, because for him the stimulation of touch was too much. Seeing him hooked up to wires, and confined in a little tiny box, wearing an eye mask to protect him from the harsh lights. But I was so lucky, because that fear was short-lived. After ten days, we took our guy home, a whopping 4½ pounds.

That first year and a half wasn’t easy. Our guy had missed out on key development in the womb, leaving him one grumpy baby. He had no internal way to sooth himself, and so he never slept longer than 45-90 minutes at a stretch. The kid had issues; a smile or a laugh was rare, and that’s exhausting and heartbreaking for a parent. Besides healthy, we all just want our kids to be happy….

Cooked Vanilla and Chocolate Almond Frostings

February 22, 2014 By Karen

Chocolate Almond Frosting, So Good You’ll Want To Eat It Straight

I have a confession: I have never been a fan of the always popular buttercream. I’ve genuinely tried to like it, and have certainly had my share. I’m not known to turn down a cupcake, and the stock topping is always a combination of butter and powdered sugar. Most of the time it is cloyingly sweet, and it just doesn’t get me excited. Let’s be honest, I still gobble it down, but it’s never what I really want. In my early baking days, a friend bought me The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. At the time, the bakery it’s from was all the rage in New York, especially after it was featured in an episode of Sex and the City. It was before cupcakes became a “thing,” and even before the long forgotten donut craze. As soon as I got it, I made their traditional vanilla birthday cake (which is great), and then did what was expected and followed their recipe for traditional vanilla buttercream. I was so disappointed. I mean really disappointed. It calls for EIGHT cups of powdered sugar for two sticks of butter! Remember, I was still new to the whole playing in the kitchen thing, so I followed the recipe exactly, not tasting it as I went along. When all was said and done, it looked beautiful, but I felt like eating it would send me straight to the dentist.

Over the years I have searched for a frosting recipe that actually makes me happy. Some have been better than others, but a few years ago I found the winner on Tasty Kitchen. This recipe looks bizarre though, like nothing I had seen before. It first calls for you to heat milk and flour together on the stove. FLOUR. In a frosting. Once that turns thick (the original recipe describes it like a brownie batter), you let it cool and then beat it to death with creamed butter and granulated white sugar. There is no powdered sugar in this. And the proportion of sugar to butter is a fraction of what you normally find in buttercream recipes. I’ve always assumed this has to be an old recipe, the kind you would find written on an index card in a box at your grandmother’s. (Certainly not my grandmother’s, but maybe yours.) Clearly priced right, with no heavy cream and a fraction of the sugar (2 cups of sugar to 4 sticks of butter, compared to SIXTEEN cups of powdered sugar to make the same amount of Magnolia Buttercream!), I figured that the flour had to be there for a reason. With a few minutes search, I found one explanation on Chowhound. Because the flour and milk are cooked like a roux, this has been referred to as Gravy Icing, and the poster called Making Sense wrote, “The Gravy Icing was terrific in the hot, humid South. In addition to being economical, especially in the lean Depression and War years, it stood up to the heat and humidity in the days before air-conditioning. Buttercreams slid right off a cake and down onto the tables.” This is a no nonsense frosting. (Or icing if you rather, but frosting is typically fluffy and thick while icing is glossy and thin.)…