Sicilian Pistachio Cake

I guess if you're away from baking for even a few weeks, you lose your mojo. I made a couple of amateurish mistakes (well, after all, I am an amateur!), and I was annoyed with myself for forgetting to order some of the beautiful, brilliant green pistachios that Rose and Matthew had for their cakes before I left for Hawaii. I knew I wasn't going to be able to find pistachios that totally satisfied me, and I was right.
These are from one of the local food co-ops, and were expensive enough--$13.99 a pound--but they weren't amazing. At least they were organic.

Still, I ended up being quite satisfied with this cake, especially with the frosting. The cake is easy enough to make--a fairly standard sour-cream/butter cake--it's hard to go wrong with that combination--made more intriguing by the addition of finely processed (but not ground to a powder) pistachios. I liked the textural addition of pistachios, so I agree with Rose's decision not to over-process them. Matthew's cake was a much brighter green than mine, because he thought ahead and ordered them, while I had to settle for what was available locally. OK, I'll quit grousing about that now.
The batter turned out thick and rich-looking--definitely not one that would smooth out by giving the cake pan a few shakes. This needed serious evening-out with the spatula.
If it weren't for the buttercream frosting, this cake would be on the quick-and-easy list, and the buttercream isn't difficult unless you screw it up, as I did.

You have to make an initial decision about whether to use Lyle's Golden Syrup or white corn syrup. This decision will have a big impact on the color of the frosting and its flavor. Lyle's has a very distinctive, sort of caramel-y taste, and it becomes the most noticeable flavor element in the buttercream. I used Lyle's syrup, and loved it, but you shouldn't use it if you want a more traditional vanilla buttercream. You can see that the "golden" syrup is actually a deep amber.

In case you missed the Plugra label in the background of this picture, here it is again. I figured that the buttercream was a good place to use the richest butter I could find. Someday I'd like to do a blind taste testing of butter. I think I might find that my real preference is for butter from Vermont Butter & Cheese, but I suppose it might also depend on how old the butter is.

The syrup (whichever kind you use), sugar, and lemon juice are mixed together and boiled.

This boiled mixture is poured carefully into the already beaten egg yolks. Easy peasy.

Everything was just going merrily along with the buttercream, but I decided that the butter needed a little more softening in the microwave before I added it to the egg mixture. For some reason, I punched in Power Level 4 for two and a half minutes; then I left the kitchen. Suddenly, I realized what I'd done. I dashed back to the kitchen, and opened the microwave. I found a big bowl of melted butter. You may not need this advice, fellow bakers, but I will give it to you anyway: it's much better to soften butter in short bursts of the microwave at low power, even though it gets annoying to do it over and over again than it is to do what I did.
I still could easily have rescued the buttercream by just softening some more butter. (I could have clarified the melted butter and put it in the freezer for some later cake. But I didn't. First, I didn't think of it until it was too late and second, I really wanted to see what was going to happen. I'm pretty sure that butter undergoes some molecular change when it melts. Even after I put it in the refrigerator, it hardened, but it never turned back into anything resembling softened butter. Call it scientific curiosity, call it stubbornness--I was driven to find out what would happen.
What happens is that the buttercream never gets to a frosting-like consistency. It's more like sludge. Delicious sludge, to be sure, but still sludge. You don't really frost a cake with this stuff; you just pour it on and hope that some sticks.

You can see how it's gathering at the bottom of the cake. I had strips of waxed paper on the cake plate to keep it from getting messy (ha!), but it just kept slowly dripping off the waxed paper onto the counter top. I tried to scoop it up and flop it back on the top of the cake, but gravity kept pulling the sludge down. I yelled at Jim to come and eat a piece of cake very quickly before it went completely bald. After I cut two pieces, I put the cake on a table on the cold front porch to see if it would firm up a bit. (It did).

Here's another cake that proves my point about these recipes having a pretty big margin for error.
So it didn't turn out quite the way I was hoping--if only I'd been able to stop myself from announcing that I'd made a Pistachio Sludge Cake, no one would ever have known it wasn't supposed to turn out the way it did. The cake is excellent, but it's the frosting that really shines here--even if the frosting is more like ooze.
If I'd happened to have some pistachio essence on hand, I might have added a little bit to the cake, but not the frosting--I think it would have fought with the rich taste of the golden syrup. But my pistachios were pretty mild, and the cake itself could have used a little more pistachio pizzazz.
And just to make those of you who knew I'd never stick to the eat-one-piece rule--I had three pieces of this cake.
TASTING PANEL:
Laurel: "Rich, but subtle--like a French dessert."
Sarah: "Delicious--love the texture that the nuts give it."
Jim: "I like the chewy nuts." (Please note that Jim had four pieces of cake this week).
Jan: "Delish."
Karen: "I like the greenness--did you choose it for spring? The frosting is very good. That syrup adds a lot of flavor. The cake has a sophisticated texture."