Best Chocolate Buttercream Frosting
Originally published February 8, 2018
Yesterday we celebrated Michael's birthday. He would've been 58 years old. Honestly, I can't even wrap my head around that number. What would 58 look like on him? How is 58 supposed to look on anyone? What will I look like when I'm 58? Questions, always questions, rarely the right answers, if any at all.
There's no moving forward, only moving through grief.
I was doing something at the stove, for the life of me I can't remember what it was, but in thinking about his age, I thought about my own, and what those looked like parallel—my 44 to his 58. They sound so disparate, and yet aside from the puppy-like feeling I had with him, our ages never really came into play.
Making his favorite cake was the best gift I could give myself for his birthday.
He truly kept me feeling young, excited about the future because I could glimpse it from his present day. I realize that sounds most peculiar, and maybe I shouldn't write in such a stream of conscious sort of way, but here I am, and that is what I feel like doing here at the moment.
The weather graced us with a snow day which meant me and the girls got to hang around in our jammies all day long. A decadent treat, indeed. We began watching The Crown a week or so ago, and had a mini-marathon in between me cooking and baking Mikey's birthday cake.
My old school Brooklyn roots shine in this cake— his favorite one, the same cake I made him every year, except for his 50th birthday. It's a Golden Vanilla Cake (basically this recipe, baked in 6-inch round pans), the best chocolate buttercream frosting in the center and also used as a crumb coat, then finished with a glaze of chocolate ganache. Yes, it's as perfect as it sounds.
Buttercream tends to get a bad rap for being too sweet, but it doesn't have to be. While you do need to use a certain amount of confectioners' sugar to balance out the amount of butter, it doesn't need to make your teeth feel like they're going to fall out. I use just enough to strike that balance, and some cream gets tipped in at the end to help create a luscious, creamy, perfectly spreadable frosting.
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