u/EloiseTheElephante

I love the light texture and not overly sweet qualities of ermine. It tastes the best to me out of all the frostings I've tried.

Unfortunately, I want to make intricate lambeth style cakes with crisp piping and very smooth sides. I tried to do this with the ermine frosting a couple of times, but either the smoothing takes like 40 minutes (freeze, smooth, freeze, smooth) and the result isn't as smooth as I'd like. It seems to be a universal problem, because I searched online and I've never seen a smooth ermine cake. I have tried King Arthur's ermine recipe and Sugarologie's ermine (both regular flour and tapioca starch). While tapioca is much easier to work with, it still pipes less defined details and doesn't smooth well.

Swiss merengue is amazing for smoothing and piping details, but is quite sweet and heavy for my taste as well as my friends'

I'm starting to wonder if my ideal cake is impossible. Am I expecting too much from ermine? Should i just use it for filling and SMBC for the exterior and piped details?

I love the light texture and not overly sweet qualities of ermine. It tastes the best to me out of all the frostings I've tried.

Unfortunately, I want to make intricate lambeth style cakes with crisp piping and very smooth sides. I tried to do this with the ermine frosting a couple of times, but either the smoothing takes like 40 minutes (freeze, smooth, freeze, smooth) and the result isn't as smooth as I'd like. It seems to be a universal problem, because I searched online and I've never seen a smooth ermine cake. I have tried King Arthur's ermine recipe and Sugarologie's ermine (both regular flour and tapioca starch). While tapioca is much easier to work with, it still pipes less defined details and doesn't smooth well.

Swiss merengue is amazing for smoothing and piping details, but is quite sweet and heavy for my taste as well as my friends'

I'm starting to wonder if my ideal cake is impossible. Am I expecting too much from ermine? Should i just use it for filling and SMBC for the exterior and piped details?

I am making an ermine frosting and am using King Arthur’s recipe (which isn’t vegan). All the other ingredients are easy substitutions, but it calls for whole milk. Whole milk contains around 3.25% fat and soy milk (the milk I have on hand is unsweetened silk) is 1.8% fat.

I want to avoid adding something like coconut cream because I don’t want there to be any coconut flavour. I don’t want to use oat milk (even though it’s higher fat) because soy milk has around the same amount of protein as whole milk, and I want the roux to be as close as possible to the original. Would I be able to add a small amount of vegetable oil and emulsify it with the soy milk to make it higher fat? I know there are plant based milks that have added oil, but I just wanted to know if anyone else had experience with this?

TDLR: Can I emulsify vegetable oil with soy milk to achieve the same fat percentage as whole milk (without using coconut cream or another plant based milk?)

I want a place where I can develop strong skills to use for my own drawings and art and am looking for an excellent teacher(s) to make sure I am properly taught the foundational skills.

Do you have any suggestions for either private teachers or places that offer group classes? Have you heard of the Academy of Art Canada and would you recommend them?