By now you should know that I am majorly obsessed with browned butter.
I’ve only mentioned it all the time, right?
And it’s what makes my salted chocolate chip cookies so dang delicious!
In the last year or so, I’ve been wondering about different ways to use browned butter so the flavor can really shine. Fast forward to a cake order that not only needed to feed 70+ people, but also was my chance to show off my knowledge of flavor combinations AND how delicious my products are.
In that moment, I knew that I had to make browned butter the center of attention for this one.
I love my vanilla cake and chocolate cake recipes more than any other cakes on the planet, but sometimes I feel like they’re overused on my blog.
I’m really interested in expanding my cake flavor options but didn’t have a whole lot of time for R&D so I decided to use a recipe that I know is incredible, but doesn’t get requested often - pistachio.
I first developed this recipe at the request of one of my closest friends for her wedding cake.
A few years later, another friend of mine was interested in what I could do for weddings and she fell madly in love with the pistachio wedding cake I made for my other friend, so she asked for the same thing.
Pistachio is an excellent starting flavor which pairs well with lots of other flavors: lemon, chocolate, rose water, and browned butter. One of my favorite pastries from a previous baking job of mine was coated in a browned butter glaze then topped with chopped roasted pistachios. I couldn’t get enough of it! Immediately I decided that I needed to create a browned butter frosting to go on this incredible pistachio cake. But seeing as how this was my chance to show off to this particular crowd, I wanted to add in another complimentary flavor to really brighten up the composition.
If this were about me, I would have chosen to incorporate rose water into the cake somehow, because I enjoy it so much and don’t often get to work with it. However, this cake was absolutely not about me and I needed to choose something that was more crowd pleasing. Therefore, I decided to use a raspberry jam as filling in between the layers to really punch up the flavors with some acidity.
It was definitely the right choice because I had people emailing and texting me for a week after the event where this cake was served, telling me they couldn’t believe how delicious the cake was, and that they thought I was incredibly talented, and they 'usually don’t eat cake', or frosting, or whatever, but they ate mine and they were thrilled with it!
A tip for you if you’re going to make American buttercream with browned butter - use a strainer! I brown my butter in a pot on the stove. For this frosting, as soon as the butter looked slightly brown, I poured the butter through a strainer directly into my mixing bowl. This removed all of the dark, solid particles from the butter, and prevented the butter from burning. The butter will continue to cook even after you remove it from the heat of your stove, so pouring it from the pot and extracting all of the butter solids that can burn is the best way to ensure maximum flavors for your butter. After the butter has solidified in your refrigerator, then you can make your American buttercream like you normally would.
Happy eating, y'all!
If you tried this dessert, or any other desserts in my blog, please share my Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram posts about them and let people know what you think! Mahalo!
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