How to make home made icing/frosting.

My son’s birthday is in two days time (it is very hard to believe he is seven already), his party is tomorrow so I have been baking birthday cakes.  In the UK I would always use commercially bought frosting for the cakes – quick and simple - it may be a cheat but it makes life so much easier.

When I was a child I always enjoyed having big statement cakes for birthdays and large events.  My mother was a virtuoso - one year  in Norway she made me a castle (with turrets made from upside down ice-cream cones), another year she sent me in to school with a bunny and a chick cake for Easter.  My children used to ask for big statement cakes as well but these days they prefer cupcakes because it is easier for them to hand them out to their friends at school.  This makes my life much much easier as they are quick to bake and easy to ice. 

Here in Kazakhstan (as in many other places) commercial frosting is difficult to find, luckily it is really easy to make at home at home.  I tend to ice cakes with a butter-cream frosting, the basic recipe is a mix of butter and icing sugar on a 1:3 ration with some vanilla or almond extract depending on taste and slackened off a little bit of milk.  The basic recipe is very versatile – it can be tinted with food colouring or flavoured in a variety of different ways.   My particular favourite is green tea frosting (perfect on chocolate muffins) made by adding Matcha powder to the basic frosting.  It is also possible to use iced tea powders to vary the flavours – apple or lemon frostings work very well and a mulled wine flavour iced tea powder adds a great flavour to Christmas cup-cakes. 

Basic buttercream frosting is very versatile and easy to use.

Certain chocolate cakes just do not work without chocolate fudge icing.  The fail-safe recipe for this is to melt butter and caster sugar in a 1:1 ratio with a little bit of water.  Pour this over a mix of 2 parts icing sugar and ½ part cocoa powder and mix to a glossy finish.  For very dark, rich chocolate cakes or carrot cakes I prefer a cream cheese frosting.  Mix 1 part cream cheese to 1 part butter then add 2 parts icing sugar. 

Chocolate fudge frosting is tasty and luxurious.

Cream cheese frosting works well with chocolate cupcakes.
Chocolate fudge icing makes a decadent topping for vanilla cakes.

Lemon drizzle cakes have the easiest icing of all – icing sugar mixed with lemon juice and a small amount of zest to a very thin consistency and drizzled over the cake so that it is absorbed leaving a moist cake with a very thin, delicate sugary crust.  I use a similar mix to ice biscuits or Danish pastries – less liquid and more icing sugar makes for a thick, white writing icing. 

Basic writing icing is versatile and effective

Change the consistency by altering the amount of liquid.

The only type of icing I find very difficult to make at home is a fondant icing for Christmas cakes.  Proper fondant icing requires gelatine and corn syrup, both items can be quite difficult to source so I tend to cheat and bring some ready made from the UK or, alternatively I just turn the cake into a ‘Dundee Cake’ ie I decorate the top with concentric rings of almonds.  I am constantly in awe of the mother of one of my sons' friends who makes stunning cakes with fondant icing.  I have no idea where she gets the ingredients or the patience to do them.

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Sugar Sugar: How to bake without specialty sugars

I had a wonderful afternoon yesterday as a friend invited  seven or eight of us over for tea and cakes.  She had made a wonderfully tasty chocolate fudge cake (my favorite) and a bannoffee and lemon meringue pie.  Yumm.  It is always good to meet up with friends because, to a great extent, they stand in for your family when you are abroad.

During our meet up talk turned, for a while, as it always does to what you can find in the shops and how to cope when you can't.  I mentioned that I had seen some caster sugar the other day and was immediately asked for details of where and when I had seen it.  Caster sugar is quite rare here and usually you have to bake with granular sugar.  I have written before on baking without baking powder and without baking chocolate but sugar is a fairly key ingredient to any cake.

Granulated sugar is easy to find

I have got used to using granular sugar, as it is not difficult to turn it into caster sugar - just put it through a coffee mill.  My food processor came with a special mini mill which I use for this purpose.  Just blitz it in 15 second bursts to make sure that you do not over process.  I usually just blitz enough to use on the cake I am baking at that particular time but I sometimes do a bulk load for friends who do not have a mill.

It is easy to make your own caster sugar

Icing sugar is easily available here and in most places.   I have made my own in the past, usually when I have realised that I had forgotten to buy the powdered sugar in the shops and had no time to go and get more.  Just blitz the sugar to a very fine powder (checking at 15 second intervals) and then add 1 tablespoon of cornstarch for every 250g of sugar.

Muscovado sugar is one of my favorite baking ingredients, it makes a lovely toffee sauce, works brilliantly in a lot of banana recipes and when combined with orange juice and mustard powder gives a tasty glaze to ham and is a must when cooking red cabbage.  Muscovado sugar is like gold dust here in Astana.  I found some in the supermarket last year and bought four kilos.  I am nearly out of it now.

All is not lost, however, because I can buy molasses here.  If you add about 2tbsp of Molasses to ordinary baking sugar to get a good replacement for muscovado sugar.  Alternatively you can replace Muscovado sugar with ordinary brown sugar.  There is less moisture in brown sugar so you may need to check your recipe and add a little more liquid.  In places where molasses has been impossible to find I have used honey or maple syrup in its place.  The recipe tastes different but not unpleasantly so. 

One of the problems of using muscovado sugar is that it gets hard very fast.  I am always careful to store mine in airtight containers but it still gets hard and my four kilos became rock solid very quickly.  I know that it is possible to re-hydrate it by placing some slices of apple or bread in the container with the sugar (remove once moist).  I usually forget to do this, if I remember that I need it the night before baking I will cover the sugar with a damp kitchen towel and leave it overnight.  If I forget that I soften it in the microwave, this takes care because the sugar can get too hot and melt or burn.  Place it in a container and put a glass of water beside it.  I usually zap it in 30 second intervals checking if it is soft in between.  In extremis (my microwave was broken) I have just used it as is without softening but using the grater to break up the larger pieces., I probably should have used the food processor.

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