Mocha Sour Cream Frosting @LucyBurdette

 

LUCY BURDETTE: If you're the cake baker in the family, and your birthday is coming up, how do you handle it? Over the years, I've decided it's really fine to make your own cake. You get exactly the flavors you want, made exactly the way you like them! So this was the icing I made back in January, and used it to frost yellow cake cupcakes. It was fabulous!

Mocha Sour Cream Frosting

1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 teaspoon espresso powder

One stick unsalted butter, room temperature

1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups of confectioner sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

About 1/3 cup sour cream

Sift together the cocoa powder and espresso powder. In your stand mixer or a large bowl with a handmixer, beat the softened butter into the cocoa/espresso mixture.

Sift in one and a half cups of confectioner sugar. Taste to see if this is sweet enough. We decided it needed another quarter cup of sugar. Beat in the vanilla. Then mix in the sour cream.

Scrape the bottom of the bowl to make sure no unmixed ingredients are lurking. Then frost your cupcakes. Because of the sour cream, these are probably best stored in the refrigerator. 

This might be the best icing we’ve ever tasted!

Lucy Burdette writes the Key West food critic mysteries. #12, A DISH TO DIE FOR, will be available on August 9 wherever books are sold!

About A Dish to Die For (#12 in the Key West food critic mystery series):

Peace and quiet are hard to find in bustling Key West, so Hayley Snow, food critic for Key Zest magazine, is taking the afternoon off for a tranquil lunch with a friend outside of town. As they are enjoying the wild beach and the lunch, she realizes that her husband Nathan’s dog, Ziggy, has disappeared. She follows his barking, to find him furiously digging at a shallow grave with a man’s body in it. Davis Jager, a local birdwatcher, identifies him as GG Garcia, a rabble-rousing Key West local and developer. Garcia was famous for over-development on the fragile Keys, womanizing, and refusing to follow city rules—so it’s no wonder he had a few enemies.

 When Davis is attacked in the parking lot of a local restaurant after talking to Hayley and her dear friend, the octogenarian Miss Gloria, Hayley is slowly but surely drawn into the case. Hayley’s mother, Janet, has been hired to cater GG’s memorial service reception at the local Woman’s Club, using recipes from their vintage Key West cookbook—and Hayley and Miss Gloria sign on to work with her, hoping to cook up some clues by observing the mourners.

But the real clues appear when Hayley begins to study the old cookbook, as whispers of old secrets come to life, dragging the past into the present—with murderous results.