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The Search.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that I like buttercream... though there is one thinkg that still eludes me, and that's a good chocolate buttercream.

Basically, there's a few different types of this stuff. There's French buttercream, which uses egg yolks (whipped up into a froth), sugar, and butter as a base; Italian or Swiss buttercream, which use a kind of meringue fluff made from egg whites and sugar to mix with the butter, and the good old German buttercream, which is a base of custard (with or without egg added) that is beaten into the butter. (Theoretically there is also American buttercream, which is just butter and sugar.) All of them are nice (well, I never tried the American version, since the first thing I do is reduce sugar amounts, and that type won't work anymore that way), all of them are water-in-fat emulsions, which means that there is a point where you cannot add more of the base to the butter, and I suspect all of them are both softened, texture-wise and stabilised, emulsion-wise, by sugar (which would explain why I sometimes have trouble with the amounts of custard per stick of butter given in a recipe where others don't - one day I will try it. Possibly.).

[caption id="attachment_3941" align="alignnone" width="640"]This is what happens if you beat in too much of the watery base - even if you have enough emulsifying agents in there, you start to get pockets of the watery phase. Next step if you beat in even more: This is what happens if you beat in too much of the watery base - even if you have enough emulsifying agents in there, you start to get pockets of the watery phase. Next step if you beat in even more: "curdling". Which means you need to have a bit more butter, whip that nice and soft. Then beat the curdled stuff into the butter, and all will be fine again.


Now, my problem is this. If you make a ganache (a filling of cream and chocolate), it is very nicely chocolatey, but it's also very solid. Combining that with a buttercream filling makes for a weird difference in texture that does not please me. So I thought I might solve the problem by making a chocolate buttercream instead, using a recipe I found for Swiss buttercream... and unfortunately, while it did taste very nice, it was just as hard and solid as the ganache. So not a winner either. (The recipe promised very high fluffyness, by the way, "like biting into a chocolate cloud". Well, no. At least not here.) Now I have gotten around to try the good ol' German style buttercream, which has you make a choc custard and then add that into the butter. The result had a pleasing texture, but a relatively mild taste that was somehow chocolatey but not really in-your-face-here-comes-chocolate-y, which is what I sort of hoped for or expected.

So... the search will go on. Maybe some French buttercream with chocolate in it next? Or a different recipe for the custard, making it more chocolatey? Hm.

If anyone here has a recipe for glorious, not-concrete-solid choc buttercream, by the way, please let me know!
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Donnerstag, 28. März 2024

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