So the other night, I was having some cravings for a confection that our local bakery calls "grasshopper brownies." They're a dense fudgy brownie with a layer of mint buttercream (with some sort of candy mixed in, either mint or white chocolate), and topped with a layer of ganache. They're very good. But, of course, the bakery wasn't open at 6:30 on a Saturday night. So I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "I know how to make brownies. And I'm pretty sure I can make buttercream, or at least I'm pretty sure I know what went wrong with the last batch I tried to make*. And ganache is dead easy. I should try to make my own! How Hard Can It Be?"Well, there were some stumbles. For one thing, I always forget that when you're baking you have to allow time for things to cool once they're out of the oven. If you don't, you either burn yourself trying to eat it, or in this case the layers will melt and collapse. So the whole operation took about 4-5 hours, which was rather more than I had expected, but at least kept me out of trouble for an evening. Also, I set the oven to the wrong temperature, so the brownies took extra time. And we didn't have any mint extract, so I used crème de menthe. Which actually did work, although the mint flavor was pretty mild. Also, the box that I had thought was a second box of confectioner's sugar turned out to be superfine instead, so I ended up having to MAKE MY OWN confectioner's sugar† to get enough to work with so that the buttercream wouldn't be hopelessly grainy.
And after all that? They actually turned out pretty damned good.
The color's pretty washed out in that photo, but the buttercream actually is green-- I found some old food coloring in the back of the pantry, and three drops was just about right.
*I did know-- the butter had been too cold. I let it warm up enough this time, and it worked much better.
†put 1 cup of sugar and 1 tsp cornstarch into a spice grinder or blender and process it for at least a minute, possibly two or more.
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