Rombauer V. Crocker: Round One (and K.O., Rombauer wins!)

We won't talk about what just happened in my kitchen.  Okay, maybe we will a little bit.  I had a serious icing mishap.  Mishap is too kind a word, really.  I'm baring the shame in sharing this in hopes that someone who knows will stumble upon it and explain to me exactly what on earth I did wrong. (Sorry, Laura, this post will be boring since I just sent you the same story in an email! lol)

It all started when I decided homemade (Betty Crocker Cookbook recipe) caramel icing would be really fantastic on top of a Joy of Cooking recipe Fudge Sour Cream Cake.  I don't know if the two recipes got into a brawl while I was joining them . . . maybe Betty and Irma are bitter rivals, or what happened, but the outcome was disastrous!  (Irma said, "A CURSE ON THE CROCKER HOUSE!" and arranged for her recipes to reject any of Betty's. )

I made the icing exactly according to the instructions: I melted the butter, I added the brown sugar, I melted it into the butter and brought it to a boil, I let it boil for 2 minutes, I added the milk, I returned it to a boil, and then I removed it from the heat to cool.  After it cooled, I added the pound of confectioners sugar gradually, and beat the mixture while the saucepan sat in a bowl of cold water (what the heck?!) and made a huge, filmy mess of water and over spray of powdered sugar on the counters and stove top.  The finished product looked like icing, it tasted like icing, and for all intents and purposes, it was icing.

As I began to spread it onto the cake, I quickly realized that it had made a drastic and terrible transformation from lovely caramel icing into something very akin in texture to sugar cookie dough.  The "icing" would not stick to the cake.  It was like the cake had put on a protective icing-proof shield or something.  The "icing" rolled up, tore, crumbled, and certainly wouldn't think of spreading.  I picked up a few of the crumbles off the plate and put them back on top of the cake.  When I did this, I realized that the icing-dough responded a little better to my warm hands than the cold metal knife I was using before.  I washed my hands and slapped the rest of the icing onto the cake and manually formed the icing with my fingers to fit around the top layer of this two-layer cake, as the stuff wouldn't stretch any further than the top layer.

It looks truly ridiculous -- like I forced the top layer of my cake to wear a stretched-out wad of cookie dough as a tracksuit -- but it tastes incredible.  Oh well.  I won't be using that icing recipe again!

Check it out. . . this was the best I could do.