French Vanilla

I have an important cake assignment coming up and the bride requested vanilla cake with vanilla butter cream. So I decided to try out some recipes before settling on anything permanent. Dunkin(sp?) Hines has a French vanilla boxed mix that's actually quite good. Looks like white cake, but uses the entire egg, so the cake is nice and sturdy. I found a recipe on line for French vanilla butter cream frosting. YUCK! It's like trying to ice a cake with a stick of butter. The flavor was awful. And the texture was worse than the taste. That recipe came from McCormick flavoring.

My next venture will be Italian Meringue Butter cream. It's supposed to hold up really well in the heat and be pretty much complimentary for any flavor cake. Found a recipe used by Warren Brown. He also does a super step-by-step lesson on IMBC preparation.

Part of me wonders if the reason I'm not too keen on the real butter cream is because I'm so used to the recipe we use for class. That one just doesn't taste fancy enough for a wedding cake. Tastes too much like grocery store frosting. We'll see how the meringue turns out. Have a great weekend!