This post inspired me to try caramel buttercream. I'm auditioning recipes for my wedding cake, and this sounded perfect. The cake will have to spend some time outside, in Chicago, in mid-July, so I went with Italian buttercream for stability. For the same reason, I didn't want to soften the buttercream by adding caramel sauce or syrup to a traditional buttercream (nor did I want to oversweeten), so I decided to go with the caramel powder trick. I made a hard caramel from RLB's recipe (1 cup sugar, 1/3 cup water, 1/8 t. cream of tartar, heated to 350 and cooled) and pulverized it in my food processor. It got a bit clumpy, but fine. I then added 1/4 cup noncaramelized sugar and proceeded with the Italian meringue buttercream recipe: heated the sugar with 2/3 c. water, beat 5 egg whites and a pinch of cream of tartar, added the sugar syrup when it reached 238 degrees, beat in 1 pound butter until frosting-y. I'm pleased to report that the caramel had no trouble dissolving in the water. The frosting curdled a bit at first, but it came together nicely. I now have 4 cups of smooth buttercream in that gorgeous caramel color. The flavor is a bit burnt, which I would have preferred avoiding but is not altogether unpleasant. I may be pairing this with a chocolate cake and a banana cake, and I will test the frosting against those flavors. (I now have 2 cups of this in the fridge just waiting for my test cakes, and 2 cups in the freezer to see how it behaves.) I wonder if the burnt flavor could be mitigated by using a higher proportion of noncaramelized to caramelized sugar. I don't want to lose the caramel flavor or beautiful color, though. And because of all the caramelized sugar, the frosting is less sweet, which I do like. I am thinking of a three-tier cake all frosted in this stuff and decorated with hard caramel shards. I don't know how well the shards would hold up in the heat of July, though.
