Frosting

Two Recent Gatherings, Plus a Great Frosting Recipe

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Here I sit in Kansas City, Missouri, well after the events I described in my last post: the post-concert reception and the dinner for the annual business meeting. So I’ll give you a quick update and then a great, simple frosting recipe that you can use in the place of that horrible powdered-sugar stuff. I’ll be doing an exhaustive (and exhausting) recipe and variations for my streamlined Swiss buttercream, but that will have to wait.

In the meantime, here’s what I did, with some helpful hints along the way:

I nixed the black pepper-Parmesan biscotti and just stuck with the spicy Cheddar cookies.

I nixed the banana cupcakes and just stuck with the pistachio ones, part of them with strawberry buttercream (recipe to come) and part with white chocolate-cream cheese frosting (recipe below).

Sorry about the rather distorted photograph; it was taken in haste via smartphone at the reception itself.

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Wonderful, Unusual Brownies for a Party

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Alas. I have no pictures of these wonderful items, but I plan to make them again soon and will try to get myself together a little better then. I look forward to having one or two of them whenever I make them because they are so absolutely incredible. I’d put them in the same category as my pumpkin-chocolate timbales. And they’re so rich and so strongly flavored that you just can’t eat too many–not at once, anyway The best kind of treat if you’re trying to limit sugar.

A number of years ago I found a recipe in the King Arthur Flour catalog called “Chocolate Stout Cupcakes.” I thought they sounded so good, got some chocolate stout (which is a type of strong, dark beer), and made them a number of times. People seemed to like them, but I always thought that they were a little dry and lacking in flavor. Then last year the great, the peerless Sally McKinney at Sally’s Baking Addiction posted a recipe called “Guinness Brownies.” Guinness is also a strong, dark beer. Hmmm, I thought, I’ll bet that would work well with chocolate stout, which is probably about the same as the Guinness, but who can resist the idea of chocolate-flavored beer? (Although I have to say that I tasted the stout once and found it unbelievably bitter.)

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