Peanut Butter Buttercream Icing

This past weekend, I put together a trial run of a very special cake I’ll be baking and decorating in the near future.  I took a cake decorating class just after the first of the year and now I feel like I can conquer the cake world (or at least in my head I can)!  The cake request was pretty simple…chocolate cake and peanut butter icing.  JPug’s birthday was yesterday…the combination of chocolate and peanut butter is one of his favorites so trial run + JPug’s birthday = a perfect fit!

I started with the highest rated made-from-scratch chocolate cake I could find on www.foodnetwork.com and paired it with the Peanut Butter Buttercream Icing recipe below.  I’m not a huge fan of chocolate cake…the one I found online was pretty good (and that's saying a lot in my non-chocolate cake liking opinion).  But, the Peanut Butter Buttercream Icing was absolutely divine!  So divine, in fact, that I ate too many spoonfuls of the leftover icing last night and nearly tossed my cookies.

I would recommend using the icing below for chocolate cake or brownies…or pretty much anything because it’s so darn good!  By the way, if you make the chocolate cake from the link above, don't be alarmed if the pre-baking consistency is really runny.  Mine was runnier than any cake I've ever made but I stuck with it and it turned out just fine.

Ingredients

• 1 C Peanut Butter
• 1 Stick Butter softened
• 1 Tbsp Meringue Powder  I purchased this at Joann’s - The Craft Store
  
• 1 lb Confectioner’s Sugar
• Milk

Directions

• Add peanut butter, butter and meringue powder to mixing bowl
• Add confectioner’s sugar a little at a time and mix well  I added between 1/4 and 1/3 of the box at a time to prevent the sugar from exploding into a cloud of dust all over the mixer and me
• Add milk (1 Tbsp at a time) and thin to desired consistency  I believe I added about 1/4 C milk total…1 Tbsp+ at a time

Enjoy!

A special thanks to Emily Matthews for sharing this recipe.