Rolled Buttercream a la Blizzard

Blizzards are a great time to bake cakes!  The only downside...I don't have the normal number of cake consumers to help distribute the calorie load.  Alas, we'll manage.

Anyway!  I went back to the good ol' standard white cake supreme this time.  I still LOVE this recipe!  Super easy to make, not an overwhelming number of ingredients, and REALLY light and fluffy.  Superb!  Since it was a 'whatever cake' (read: it had been a while since I made a cake and I was avoiding homework), I used some of the leftover chocolate buttercream frosting from several cakes back to ice the crumb layer.  The two layers also came out quite uniform, so there was less of a weird leaning Tower of Pisa thing going on.

Making the rolled buttercream was an interesting experience.  I used the dough hook attachment for the mixer (for my first time EVER) and it was quite odd.  It did mix everything, but the time lapsed addition of the powdered sugar ensured a constant vapor cloud of sugar.  I was worried that I would get a sugar high from breathing it in for so long.  Two pounds of sugar and a cup of crisco later...and we have a pretty cool almost-fondant topping.

The rolled buttercream was quite a bit less hearty than the fondant, so rolling it out was more difficult.  I ended up putting quite a bit more powdered sugar in as I was rolling it out.  Once rolled, we slabbed it on the cake without any major disasters!  Hurrah!  Mom is the official excess buttercream cutter, and we're still working on the technique for that.  The main issue so far is making sure that we leave enough buttercream (or fondant) to go all the way to the bottom of the cake.

This tastes SO MUCH BETTER than Fondant!  I will say it now: Fondant Sucks.  Rolled Buttercream Rocks!