Quickie Post: Buttercream Disaster…

UPDATE – I found a solution to this problem – see my post on it here.

These things HAVE to happen in the middle of the night don’t they?

So as you know I do a cake decorating class on Saturdays.  This Saturday they required a chocolate buttermilk cake fully filled and masked – so that’s why I was crazy baking this week.

This cake is just set out for disaster and I hope that tonight was the last disaster it decides to go through….

First we needed 7″ round cakes – I didn’t have the pans and drove to all the stores nearby earlier this week to find these pans – everyone sells 6″ and 8″ and after some unhelpful hints I remembered my in-laws factory and got them there.

By the way, if you read this, thank you dear wonderful lady at Michael’s “you s hould go to a cake store”…”good idea, do you know of any?”…”You’ll have to google it”…

I wanted to smack her.  But I didn’t.  Because I’m civi-ma-lized.  Sorta.

Anyways, so I got the 7″ pans, but not till after I baked two 8″ rounds – hence my cake generousity t his week.  I officially had seven cakes in my fridge and freezer on Wednesday night…oh yeah and some frozen cupcakes…

So I took one to work where it was gone in no time.

@jen2cee has one waiting in the freezer for her.

And the other three were trimmed, stacked, filled and masked today.

That is…until the final mask.

I had put the cake in the fridge to harden up the buttercream so that I could clean it up more easily, but my mistake was I decided to write my previous post in the meantime, so the extra buttercream I wanted to mask with after was rock hard.  And in a stainless steel bowl that I can’t put in the microwave.

Because I’m lazy, I put my stove burner on minimum and started manipulating it until I figured it was at an okay consistency to work with.

I started masking my cake.

Then I noticed liquid on my cake board.

So I took papertowel and sopped it up thinking that maybe it was my utensil that had some water on it.

Then the masking started falling off the cake, off the cakeboard, down my cupboards and onto my floor.

So I kept sopping up and cleaning and trying to spread.

But not matter how much I sopped up, more liquid pooled at the bottom of my cake…..and the buttercream was this yellowy-brownish colour….

I managed to cover the entire thing and was busy smoothing it out when it kept moving and coming off.

I was so frustrated.

I’ve been masking for months now and this has NEVER happened.

So I made the final decision to remove my final mask completely – @habitueTO this was about when you texted).

I had to DAB MY CAKE DRY there was so much moisture under the weird buttercream.

Buttercream mush AFTER all the water fell on my foot

So I took all of it and put it into a Loblaws bag to throw it in the organic…..but failed to notice a little hole at the bottom of the bag.

The liquid that had increased by like, ten times (I SWEAR) came pouring out of the hole, onto my foot and splashed onto the floor and up onto my cabinets.

Needless to say, this thing stinks.  It really does.  My kitchen smells, my apartment smells and now I smell of rancid dairy….because I think the egg whites in the buttercream AND the butter in the buttercream said “ENOUGH” and decided to turn to the dark side.

So after all of that, I do a quick clean because I’m frustrated….and decided I had to post this.

I was able to save my cake.

At least to put fondant on it and then toss it in the trash.

I don’t trust that it is edible anymore.

At least it’s portfolio fodder – you can make anything look good with photography.

For example, my cake that has small puddles of weird liquid on it still….with a simple Instagram photo…can look like this.