I'm planning on making these using her recipe as a guide. I've got a cupcake recipe, and I plan on baking them in the flat bottomed ice cream cones My question regards her icing. In her recipe, she calls it frosting and I've seen others refer to it as buttercream but it has no butter in it. It's basically a swiss meringue but before it becomes a buttercream. Has any one made this? Does it really last and hold it's shape and taste good? Can you see any reason not to use a real swiss meringue buttercream or is that just too much icing?

http://www.marthastewart.com/350006/hi-hat-cupcakes


Thanks

I haven't made those cupcakes but I do use Swiss meringue and it is so easy to use. I think I actually use Italian meringue which is stronger but tastes the same. I use it on my lemon meringue cupcakes (pictured on my site) and I can torch it to make the dark sugar marks like a lemon meringue pie. It pipes perfectly and keeps it's shape.

Absolutely love them. The frosting is wonderful, and I've added it to lemon cupcakes or smores cupcakes and then used a kitchen torch on it. It's just fantastic. It will hold it's shape as well. I failed at the recipe the first two times I made it though, because I didn't get it to the right temperature, but once I hit that magic mark, I was headed for success. Have fun with it!

~Holly

I make them all the time using Italian meringue. Just make sure to leave them in the freezer for at least half an hour so they take the chocolate well, and come out nice and smooth.

I think the frosting Martha uses is 7 minute Frosting, which is basically egg whites and sugar beat into a meringue.

With the amount of frosting required on a Hi-Hat, i think that a SMBC would be too rich. The straight meringue is lighter and probably easier to eat (like a marshmallow fluff) instead of the buttercream.

So I made them this weekend to try them out before our bbq next week. I wasn't 100% sure about the frosting but it turned out well and tasted pretty good. My only comment is the chocolate coating. When they had only been in the fridge a half hour or so, they set, but obvously melted fairly quickly in ones fingers. I sent them to work with DH today so they were in the fridge overnight He said they were a huge hit but the chocolate did eventually get soft and melt a bit. Anyone have any ideas if it's possible to have this coating not melt so much? I guess just bringing them out at dessert time, so they don't melt would probably be best.

http://cakecentral.com/gallery/2324697/hi-hat-cupcaes