Happy Accidents

Sometimes accidents turn out to be happy ones.

This seems especially true with creative projects of all kinds. There are plenty of stories of people trying to write songs and ending up with penicillin by accident. Okay, maybe not plenty and maybe nothing like that has ever happened but sometimes what seems like a bad situation can morph into an entirely unexpected good one.

You probably think I’m about to go deep with this concept but alas, no. I’m just going to talk about frosting. Specifically, mocha buttercream frosting.

Last year a friend came out to visit and was joined by several members of her extended family for a big reunion/birthday celebration. She (very generously, I might add) commissioned three cakes from me for the big event—one for each of the two birthdays being celebrated and one big one for the whole family. We agreed on the themes for the two smaller birthday cakes fairly quickly but it was more difficult to come up with something that would work for the whole group. Everyone liked chocolate but not too much chocolate, there were some nut allergies, some dislike of fruit flavors, and we needed something fun for the kids. I was still unsure of the final design—though I had a few of the elements—up until the day before when I decided to make the frosting at least and hoped the rest would come to me. I’d decided to go with a two-tiered chocolate cake with a mocha buttercream (why mocha buttercream, I still don’t know, but it seemed like it would balance out the chocolate a bit) and since mocha buttercream was not one of my specialties, I searched around for a recipe that sounded good. By the way, untried recipe before a big event/dinner party/etc.? Very. Bad. Idea.

Imagine my dismay when I made the recipe and the buttercream, which was supposed to be “smooth, whipped, and dreamy” looked grainy, wet, and nightmarish. I had made a large amount of it and it was too late to start over. I tasted it. Delicious. But what to do about the look of it. I stuck it in the fridge hoping it would firm up and smooth out when it got a bit cooler and worked on the other elements of the cake—some chocolate shells and homemade lollipops. But when I reached back in for it, I saw that the buttercream, while firmer, had become even grainier looking and was flecked with espresso and cocoa. It looked, in fact, very much like…sand.

Hmm. Sand. Family reunion. Beautiful Del Mar. And so the Back to the Beach Cake was born—a big sandcastle of a cake with shells, scattered brown sugar sand and golden lollipop suns on top.  Despite the fact that everyone liked the cake and that the buttercream was actually the best part (not too sweet and with a complex, rich flavor), I was so rattled by the experience that I put the recipe away and didn’t even think about using it again. Until yesterday.

Yesterday another friend came to visit this beautiful paradise where I live and to welcome him I decided to make a much smaller version of the same cake. This time I halved the recipe but made it exactly the same way. As I was preparing it, the thought did occur to me that this time it would turn out to be smooth and dreamy and nothing at all like what I was going for.

But although the buttercream looked decidedly creamy right after I made it, a few hours in the fridge got it back to the sandy look I was going for (it was still buttery and smooth on the tongue). After the addition of a chocolate starfish and chocolate shells that I made (and some Cadbury Flake "driftwood"), it was done.
A happy accident. A tasty cake.