Satiny Beige Frosting: or, Brown sugar shaving cream

We finally got a cake plate!

Satiny Beige Frosting ½ cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed ¼ cup light corn syrup 2 tablespoons water 2 egg whites 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix sugar, corn syrup, and water in 1 quart saucepan. Cover and heat to rolling boil over medium heat. Uncover and boil rapidly to 242° on candy thermometer (or until a small amount of mixture dropped into very cold water forms a firm ball that holds its shape when pressed). As mixture boils, beat egg whites in 1½ quart bowl (ie, the small bowl that comes with most stand mixers) just until stiff peaks form. While still beating, pour hot syrup very slowly in thin stream into egg whites. Be sure to keep the mixer going the whole time. Add vanilla; beat on high speed until stiff peaks form. It may seem like the icing will never have peaks, but have patience and let your mixer keep going. Spread on the cake while it's warm (no need to let it cool off). Enough for a 9"x13" cake, or the tops and sides of two 8- or 9-inch cake layers. Note 1: You really want to use a stand mixer for this recipe. If you use a handheld mixer, you have to carefully avoid pouring dangerously hot syrup on the back of your hand while you beat the icing. If you use a stand mixer, both of your hands are safely out of the way. Note 2: The molten sugar cooks the egg whites as you pour it in. So you don't need to worry about raw eggs. Note 3: Any extra icing freezes well if placed in a well-sealed container, or a plastic bag with the air squeezed out. Source: Betty Crocker's Cookbook, 1986 edition

I've been wanting a nice, big, flat platter for cakes for a long time. After temporarily removing the microwave from service to borrow its platter a few times, I thought to myself "This is actually a really nice plate! I don't think you could get one as good if you tried to buy an actual cake platter!"

A microwave platter is a nice size for putting a cake on. Also, the glass platters in microwaves never crack-- not even when I get a bit fumble-handed when getting one in and out of the dishwasher. I'm not a glass expert, but I know there are multiple types of glass, and some kinds are sturdier than others. Some kinds of glass seem to love chipping, but the glass they use for microwaves can withstand a lot of mishaps before it finally gets damaged.

Rather than pay for one, I went on the town's Reddit page asking if anyone was unloading a dead microwave. I offered to dispose of the entire microwave in return for letting me take the plate out of it. Someone responded that they had one, and furthermore I didn't even need to make room in the car for the whole microwave. By happy coincidence, this was bulk trash week. So they said they'd remove the plate and put it out of the way, and leave the rest of the microwave on the curb with the rest of their dead tree branches and broken furniture.

They said that it would be "behind the picket fence on the side of the house," adding "Don't knock, you'll only rile up the dogs. Just grab it." I didn't know what they meant (well, I understood the part about the dogs), but I figured it'd make sense when I got there. And sure enough, there was a tiny little picket-fence box on the side of the house, with nothing but bare dirt in it.

It's not the Canadian way to post pictures of random people's houses, so I had fun in MSPaint instead.

I don't know why these people had a little fenced-in box on the side of the house. There were no signs of a former tomato patch or something in there. It's almost like they fenced in a special area just for leaving out random things they were giving away.

I absolutely love the idea of having a designated giveaway zone on the side of your house.

As an anecdotal side note, I think this year's bulk trash piles show the state of the economy better than any graph on the news. In more prosperous times (and heck, even during the "Great Recession"), you'd see a lot of things that were not necessarily worthless, but also not worth the time to put on Craigslist (or later, Facebook Marketplace.) You could easily get new(ish) dinner plates, a slightly rusted patio bench, and other things like that. But this year, I only saw broken junk in people's curb piles. Few people can afford to throw out a solid-wood table just because the finish is ruined.

Here it is, fresh out of the car and ready for its first trip through the dishwasher!

Setting aside this year's shortage of slightly-distressed curbside furniture, I had to modify the platter for its post-microwave life. Some microwave plates have a raised ring on the underside so that they can sit flat on a tabletop in spite of those three nubs in the center. This one did not, so it wobbled very badly when removed from its former home.

I could have taken it to an art glass studio, and they probably could have flattened it in a few minutes. But they would likely have charged for their service, at which point I may as well have taken my money to the nearest thrift store and bought a castoff serving tray. Instead, a brutal and surprisingly tedious job with a Dremel ensued.

It's not the best tool for the job, but we had one at hand.

Those three glass bumps seemed a lot bigger when I was trying to grind them away. But the plate can now rest on the counter without shaking, even though it looks terrible.

Those peak-pandemic-era face masks came in really handy.

I wanted to polish the scars away, and I did have at the plate with extra-fine sandpaper which helped a little. Then I went online to ask if there ways a way to properly smooth it out without any specialized tools. The best answer I got: "Cover it with cake." And I realized that actually, no one will see the damage until after the cake has been served.

Anyway, I wanted this plate's first cake to be something special and self-indulgent. I tried a new recipe that didn't work and wasted half a dozen eggs on its way to the trash can. I didn't want the next cake to add too much to the pile of eggshells. Fortunately, Mrs. Wilson of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger came to the egg-carton rescue with her one-egg cake!

I really love fun cake colors, even if most people don't like blue and purple cakes. But this is my cake, which I am making for my special new cake plate. After dyeing it a rather fetching shade of aqua, it was ready to bake. And because Mrs. Wilson's recipes never fail, it came out perfect.

I tried to do a two-toned swirl, but it didn't quite work.

This finally brings us to today's recipe. We are covering our plate's first cake in something called "Satiny Beige Frosting." I always noticed this this when I was flipping through my mother's Betty Crocker cookbook and thought it was a peculiar name. It's an odd choice to proudly call something "beige." How many people get excited about beige anything? I still remember when people derisively called home computers "beige boxes" until the whole industry switched to black plastic. Anyway, I never made the satiny beige frosting because I only got one birthday cake per year and didn't want to risk bad icing.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get the recipe from our family's copy of the book. It fell apart years ago and Mom threw it out. So even though I wanted to finally find out if satiny beige was any good, I couldn't. But what should I espy in a used bookstore but... this!

It's a different book edition from one we had, but I doubt they altered this particular recipe. I nabbed a picture of the relevant page and left the book in the store. 

As a recipe note, the directions say this covers 2 cake layers. Even though only baked one, I made the full amount of icing anyway. As we have learned, it's better to have too much icing than to run out early.

Satiny beige frosting starts with a lot of brown sugar (always a good sign) and... corn syrup. I tried not to think about how long this syrup has been in the pantry. I bought it when I needed two tablespoons of it for a candy recipe. To my surprise, it still hasn't expired as long as you ignore the date on the cap.

We are told to put a lid on the pot and then let it come to a full rolling boil. This is the first time I have ever wished I had a glass lid. I figured I'd just keep one ear on the pot and wait for the noise. 

Meanwhile, it was time to set our cooled cake onto our beautiful, dishwasher-friendly cake plate! When I got it out, I thought to myself "Ooo, those grinding scars look even worse." And of course, the glass shows every dirt smudge on the counter beneath it. But really, any clear plate will do that. But I followed the advice I got online and covered both problems with cake.

All hail Mrs. Wilson!

They say a watched pot never boils. Well apparently, an unwatched one tries to boil over. I took off the lid to see if we had any bubbles yet, and found this.

Sooner than I thought, the uncovered syrup reached the firm-ball stage. It was time to take the pot off the stove and try to aim a slow dribble at our mixing bowl. Keep in mind that candy syrup is literally hotter than boiling water. (Also, this is how you get away with covering a cake with raw egg whites. The hotter-than-boiling syrup cooks them.)

After we had emptied the pot of its molten contents, our frosting didn't look very beige. It was more tan-colored. It was also far too gloppy to stay on a cake.

I left the mixer going, periodically checking if the icing had stiffened up a bit. Even with our stand mixer going at full-speed, it took a few minutes. But eventually, the icing managed to stand up on its own. By this point, its color had lightened until it was as beige as the recipe name.

And so, it was time to get this icing onto the cake!

This was the softest icing I have ever put onto a cake. It felt like shaving cream under the spatula. I am pleased to say that without an annoying dinner plate rim to get in the way, we managed a pretty good icing job in just a few minutes! (Well, a pretty good icing job by pre-social media standards.)

Seriously, this is what cakes used to look like unless Mom had worked in a bakery at some point. Our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker has a book of home cake decorating from back then. And while I didn't attempt any ambitious decorations, the icing itself looks about the same as the cakes that made it to print.

As for the icing, it tasted a lot like divinity. (If you've never had divinity, it's basically whipped white sugar. Imagine unflavored taffy, but not hard enough to pull out your tooth fillings.) The brown sugar taste had all but disappeared, leaving nearly-blank sweetness. And it it really is as soft as shaving cream. 

I'm actually going to say that because it's so hypersweet, it's perfect for kids' birthday parties. Slather this stuff on a cake, and they'll all have their sugar fix a lot quicker. This would theoretically allow you, the parent on a budget, to get away with much smaller cake pieces.

But this icing is not good after the first day. It turns into a hardened, sticky mess. I could have repurposed the cake as a fly trap. Satiny beige frosting okay the first day if you like sugar-flavored mousse, but by day two it's just not good. So, if you want to keep this cake around the house for a few days and gradually cut slices off of it, this is not the icing for you. But to Betty Crocker's credit, the icing didn't deflate at all. Three days later, it was just as fluffy as when we first took it out of the mixer. 

And so, we joyously welcome our new cake plate into the kitchen! The next cake on it will be something less vividly colored, even if I don't think that's nearly as fun.