After Tuesday’s WeddSplosion cake tasting I was only able to give away 2 of the 3 cakes I baked.  Luckily, the awesome Marble Mocha cake was the one leftover.  This meant it was obviously time to whip up some Mocha Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

I know it’s annoyingly yuppie of me to have used Starbucks instant coffee for the frosting (and for the cake) but since this was originally for my friends’ wedding cake, I couldn’t bring myself to buy regular-old Folgers brand.  Why not go classy San Diego and get some quality instant coffee?

You can see from the picture that I didn’t do anything fancy in terms of decoration, and that was because I didn’t want to go crazy with this; it was more an experimentation with flavors than a practice in decoration.  I already had the instant coffee left over from the cake, so I shot a quick tweet to Sweetapolita for advice on how to integrate coffee with my SMB.  Luckily for me, it was easy-peasy.

The coffee was wonderfully finely ground and after adding it the buttercream’s color changed to the excellent color you see above, a beautiful tan-coffee.  I wish I could have gotten a better picture, but you get the idea.  Additionally, it smelled delicious.  I momentarily toyed with the idea of having a coffee-only flavored frosting, but I’d already broken out the Scharffen Berger…and honestly once you’ve done that, there’s no turning back.  This time around I used my 99% cocoa bar.  I wanted some serious rich mocha flavoring going on.

I thought it might be nice to have an action photo of me slowly adding the chocolate to the firmed-up swiss meringue buttercream.  Feeling incredibly sure of myself, I poured it in with my left hand and took a surprisingly clear photo with my right.  Moments after this picture was taken, I dropped the spoon into the running mixer.  It made a lovely sound.  Luckily, no damage was done…though I did have to muck my hand around in the icing a bit to find the spoon. >.>

 

From there I did a simple slather-n-go for the rest of the cake.  I was going to use the Kahlua I’d bought previously for the cake, but promptly forgot about it by the time I started the icing.  Whoops! >.>  I guess I’ll just have to save it for BHF11PP.

I haven’t had a slice of the entire cake yet, but I can conclusively that if the mocha marble cake was tasty (it was) and if the mocha SMB was tasty (it was) then by some sort of mathematical property, the two together must also be tasty (transitive property, maybe?).  In any case, I’ll have a slice tomorrow and report back to its specific level of deliciousness.

Finally, I’m not sure why it is my chocolate swiss meringue buttercreams seem to come together a lot more easily than non-chocolate ones.  Any thoughts on that? 😀

 

Mocha Marble Cake with Mocha Buttercream

Mocha Swirl Cake from Martha Stewart.  Makes one 6″ cake.

Mocha Buttercream adapted from Whisk Kid.

• I actually left out the vanilla from this recipe, and it tasted great.
• After the SMB comes together, add 1 tsp instant coffee or cappuccino and mix thoroughly.
• Melt ~100g chocolate and let cool slightly.  Pour slowly into the SMB while mixing.  Mix thoroughly.