Chocolate Frosting

Happy New Year's Eve!

I am trying something new today - posting from my iPad.  So, if anything looks weird, it's not intentional!  We'll see how this goes.

I have written before on the favorite chocolate cake around here.  It's on every Hershey's Cocoa container - Perfectly Chocolate Cake.   The Perfectly Chocolate Frosting that goes with it is the best chocolate frosting ever!  I had been having a little trouble with the frosting being smooth, due to the way the ingredients are added, but I have played with it and gotten a frosting that I get rather excited about!   Since the butter and cocoa mixture are warm from melting the butter, when I would add the milk, the chocolate would cool and there would be thicker bits of cocoa throughout the frosting.  What I have started doing is making the frosting in the pan that I melt the butter in.   This way there is not any drastic change in temperature and rapid cooling.  (Note: turn the burner off)  I add part of the powdered sugar first, mix it really well with the hand mixer, then add a small amount of the milk.  At this point it looks like it is never going to be smooth, but it gets the sugar and cocoa mixture evenly incorporated so that there are not any clumps of chocolate.  Then repeat with the rest of the powdered sugar and milk.  I just keep mixing and using a spatula to move the icing from the sides of the pan.  I do this for much longer than seems necessary, and add a little more milk if it seems a little too thick.  It becomes this beautiful smooth velvety frosting.  A key thing is to not get caught up in the excitement of the pretty frosting and forget to add the vanilla at the end.  This has happened to me and I was the only one that noticed, but it tastes much better with vanilla.  And, it will keep you from wondering why the cake tasted different this time, and waking up in the middle of the night saying - of course it was different, I forgot the vanilla in the frosting!   A few times I was afraid to add more milk and then regretted it because the frosting was a little harder to spread.  Plus, sprinkles stick a lot better to a moister frosting.

I purchased a Wilton Cake Caddy with the turntable base - this makes all the difference in frosting a round cake!  I can focus on the frosting, not the rotating of the cake.   This also stores the cake very well, which always seems to be a problem with layer cakes - airtight, no smashing the icing....

I had bought the disposable 9x13 cake pans so I could easily take a cake to an dinner and not worry about how I was going to transport it and deal with a pan/platter.  I love making the cakes in these pans!  Since it's not a layer cake and due to the shape of the pans, the cake is a little more dense and so moist!  The clear plastic lids are great too!  

These are not new inventions, but things I just started using and am quite happy with!

Below are a bunch of cakes I have made over the past year.  I guess I didn't take a picture of the first one I made in the disposable pan; it was so beautiful and just pretty icing, not overloaded with sprinkles.  Not that you can have too many sprinkles, but the icing was beautiful.

Now I need to go make one of these cakes to frost with white icing for our New Year's Eve dinner. :-)