Happy Thursday everyone!  If you haven’t melted yet, the flavors in these two recipes would be enough to refresh you… I had to stop myself from eating the whole bowl of the orange-flavored one!

I get to take a trip for work over the next couple days, which is the main reason that I’m doing this cake in pieces… well, that and the fact that I’m learning doing this in sections is much easier and less stressful (note to self: keep splitting it up!)

For this Dreamy Creamsicle Cake, I wanted to make two different kinds of frostings and/or fillings (I haven’t decided which one is which yet).  One is a Vanilla Cream Cheese Frosting (CCF), and the other is an Orange Italian Meringue Cream Cheese Buttercream (that is seriously a mouthful and will hereafter be referred to as Orange IMCCB).

I had done a lo-o-o-ot of research on making an Italian Meringue Buttercream (IMBC) with cream cheese (and, if you’re wondering… that lo-o-o-ot is a four-syllable “lot”), and found several very scary references to the final product breaking due to too much fat.  The idea of this buttercream breaking is absolutely terrifying – one, because IMBC is my second favorite type of frosting (behind French Buttercream), it’s just so smooth and creamy, and the idea of ruining it just breaks my heart a little; two, because I didn’t feel like buying a bunch of extra eggs and cream cheese, and three, because it just is (I’ve got nothing else – I should’ve thought this through before I made a numbered list).

Anyhoo, after I figured out the proper proportions of butter to cream cheese so as to not break the buttercream, I went to town making the meringue, then the cream cheese buttercream, adding in the orange extract, vanilla extract, and orange zest last.  I took a little spoonful… and oh. dear. Lord.  I am not lying when I saw that if I didn’t need that for a cake, I would’ve plopped myself in front of the TV with the bowl, a spoon, and Friends on DVD and just ate/licked myself sick.  It was that good.  (Actually, writing this right now is making me salivate a little… maybe I need to go get another lick… hm.  If only the cats didn’t give me those looks dripping with disdain.)

Now that I’ve tried all these separate flavors (cake, Orange IMCCB, and Vanilla CCF), I CANNOT wait to construct this cake and cut myself a giant piece.  If the whole is as good as these pieces are… I think we’re in for a real treat!

Orange Italian Meringue Cream Cheese Buttercream

• 148 g sugar
• 36 g water
• 74 g egg whites
• 147 g unsalted butter, softened
• 111 g cream cheese, softened
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp orange extract
• zest of 1/2 large orange
• Orange gel syrup (to color)