Adventures In Fruity Frosting
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In our family, the most frequent choice for a birthday celebration dessert is chocolate cake with raspberry filling. There’s a reason for that, of course…it’s a classic and utterly delicious flavor combination.
I’ve usually made this dessert by making several circular layers of chocolate cake, then putting seedless raspberry jam between the layers, and finishing with chocolate frosting or ganache for the top and sides of the cake. But these days, I don’t really want the hassle of baking multiple cakes, leveling each layer, assembling the layers with the filling, making frosting (or ganache), and spreading it over the outside of the cake. It’s a lot less work to just make a cake in a 9x13” pan; then frost the top of that and serve it right out of the pan.
The problem with that approach is that it doesn’t give opportunity to add raspberry filling because there’s only the one layer. Solution? Raspberry frosting.
When I was making this for the blog, I baked myself a 9x13” pan of brownies (from the box…I was feeling lazy) and flavored a can of whipped vanilla frosting to get my raspberry flavor. But the general method I’m going to describe works even better if one is making buttercream frosting from scratch.
The secret? Powdered freeze-dried raspberries. Or any fruit you like, really. But for the purposes of the chocolate/raspberry cake, I’m going with raspberries. Helpful hint from someone who found out the hard way: do NOT try buying whole freeze-dried fruits and then grinding or blending them down. You will not like the result.
For my brownies, I used whipped canned frosting, which has a lighter thinner texture than other canned frosting. This was important because I was going to be adding powder to the frosting, which would thicken it up. For one can of frosting, I used about 45 g of the powdered raspberries, which gave a lovely color and a delicious flavor. One of the nice things about raspberries in particular is that, while they are sweet, they are at the same time quite tangy. This little bit of sour flavor does a lot to cut through the sickly sweetness of most frostings.
So I just dumped in some raspberry powder, used my cordless hand mixer (love this device!) to blend it with the frosting, then did a little taste test and kept adding powder until I liked the flavor. With canned frosting, there is an upper limit to how much powder you can add before the frosting becomes too thick to spread, and I’m not really a fan of adding milk or cream to artificial frosting. But with buttercream, it’s easier. First, start by substituting some of the powdered fruit for the powdered sugar. Taste. Add more powder if needed until you get it where you want it. Don’t forget a pinch of salt to punch up all the flavors. Then finalize the texture with milk or cream. Easy peasy!
I will say that not all freeze-dried fruit is created equal. Raspberries have a potent flavor, as do tart cherries. But I tried this once with powdered strawberries and it took an incredible amount of the powder (plus a little help from some artificial flavoring) to make the frosting taste recognizably like strawberries. So you will have to play around with your proportions.
This is a really easy way to make a fruit-flavored frosting and you are using actual fruit to do it. So it’s actually (marginally) healthier than your average frosting. Eat cake, everyone! (Or brownies, which I would argue are actually better than cake.). Do it for your health!
