After the cake finally baked and was cooling, I turned my attention towards making the frosting. The whole time my son is following me around pulling chairs up to the counter to help stir and help taste. We had a minor crisis when my son wanted to taste the baked cake; he found a butter knife and dug it into one of the layers putting a hole all the way through. I was a little perturbed at my son’s need to take matters into his own hands but after a short nursing break with my daughter, we got back to the frosting. The frosting we were making for my husband’s birthday cake was and Italian Meringue Buttercream. I had been wanting to make a “cooked” frosting for a long time but found it too intimidating. I finally bit the meringue bullet when making a birthday cake for my husband’s dad and have been making Italian Meringue Buttercream ever since. The biggest risk with making a meringue buttercream is the tendency for the frosting to go souping after adding the butter. It takes lots of patience, lots of whipping, and some ice packs. Once the meringue buttercream had reached the ideal consistency (very thick), I assembled the three layer white cake with a black raspberry glaze on the layers underneath the frosting. I put the cake into the refrigerator to set up and started peeling red onions for the French Onion Soup. I never realized how long it takes to conservatively peel onions, but it took a lot longer that I thought it would during which my daughter let me know that she wanted to nurse again. After another nursing session, I started heating the stock pot to caramelize the onions and slicing the red onions. Caramelizing onions takes anywhere between thirty minutes to one hour depending on the amount of onions and the heat of the stove top. It took me upwards of an hour to caramelize seven thinly sliced onions. Once the onions were caramelized, putting the rest of the soup together was easy…
(To be continued …)