As per Rose’s suggestion, I always freeze left over buttercream to be used at a later time for cupcakes.  Recently I was out with a friend running errands around town..and he hadn’t seen my new apartment…and wanted to see it.  So we headed over there…we were hungry…and i said…lets order in some dinner.  (Yes ... this is going somewhere…hang in). A local Italian restaurant delivers…and i placed an order…they said it would be about 35 minutes. 
I said to my friend “cupcakes for dessert?” He said…“you have cupcakes?” I said “I’ll make them”.  Now this is not a common occurance in New York…lots of people never cook at all…I know someone who keeps books in her oven…so the idea of fresh cupcakes…from SCRATCH no less, was all but unheard of for him. 

In the 35 minutes that it took for the food to come…I had mixed up 1/2 recipe of Roses all occasion yellow cake… and got it in the oven.  I took out a couple of freezer bags of frozen chocolate mousseline….chopped up the frozen butter cream with a cleaver so it would defrost faster, took the cupcakes out of the oven to cool. Our dinner arrived and we sat down to eat.

By the time we were done with dinner, the cupcakes were cool and the buttercream defrosted.  I rebeat the buttercream, frosted the cupcakes…and just reveled in the look of amazement on my friend’s face.

Oh, you clever clogs! LOL

Fantastic testimony!  I’m amazed when people tell me they don’t cook or bake… can you imagine!

well done bill!  that is how I do it, too!

Way to go Bill! I always have a batch of buttercream in my freezer too. So useful and convenient.

ditto, and in fact I have adapted Mousseline Buttercream into my recipe called IMBC 15-3 (Italian Meringue Buttercream 15.3 cups)..... it is the only batch size I do.

Thanks for sharing that, Bill.  It gives me the confidence to do the same.  I usually bake when I’m all alone and have plenty of time. I never thought about baking on the fly like that.    bravo

I’m an IMBC fan too, and I can testify that Rose’s recipe was useful and quite stable even when used to frost a wedding cake in tropical summer weather (about 34 C in the shade when we set up the cake).  That was the only time I’ve done a large wedding cake, a gift of love for my brother. Without Rose’s Cake Bible I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. True, the icing did melt a little, but at least the flavor was wonderful. 
The only thing with buttercreams in tropical weather is that I used the minimum amount of butter, and punched up the stability by adding some pastry cream to some of the italian meringue buttercream for filling the cake.

Corinna

Corinna, that is interesting, to use pastry cream to make the buttercream more heat resistant.

At your 34 C, does a stick of butter remain solid or does it melt into a puddle?

Hello Hector:

(What a great caramel bridge by the way!)  I have been using what I’ve been told is a German technique, adding a very pasty (high flour) pastry cream to a yolk buttercream, or in the case of my brother’s wedding cake, a combination of italian meringue buttercream and pastry cream buttercream, much like Rose’s mousseline, but for the larger amount of flour in the pastry cream. 

At 34 C, a stick of butter softens into an unpipe-able thing, so I try to work with butter right out of the chiller. popping it into the mixer and piping before it gets to room temp, and try to finish icing cakes before the icing warms up too much. Setting up in 34 C weather isn’t fun, and there were smears here and there that needed fixing, and the cake wasn’t photo perfect at all angles, but it sure was delicious. I’ll post photos sometime.

Corinna

Corinna, thanks for sharing the details.  Not sure if you have already done so, have you tried Mousseline Buttercream?  It is stable at 32oC!!!

The webbing formed by the hot sugar heated to the recommended temperature holds the butter in place into perfect emulsification.

And thanks for walking on my bridge!