Buttercream disaster

[Lyingonthesofainthedark]

I've just made a buttercream with cream cheese, icing, butter and lemon zest. The recipe said to spread it with a palette knife. Disaster struck, as heaps of crumbs from the cake became caught in the buttercream, right around the sides especially 😫

What major errors did I commit, apart from clumsiness?

I usually do a rough thin spread around the edges to catch all the crumbs in (it's called a crumb coat) and then do a thicker layer on top

Yeah, you should have done a thin crumb coat first

You needed to do a crumb coat first!

Basically a thin layer of buttercream, leave it to set and then apply the rest.

Ooh thank you. So how do you make the "crumb" coat thin without dragging even further? At the moment the whole thing is a crumb coat!

The point of the crumb coat is to set all of the crumbs in the icing. It looks messy stuff that stage, nothing you can do about it. Once they are set in the icing then you apply the neat clean buttercream over the top.

I've never tried it with a cream cheese butter cream though. Just a normal butter/icing sugar one.

You would have used less of the butter cream and spread it thinly. Can you remove some of what you have applied and mix up a new batch

And dip the palette knife in hot water.

Using cream cheese was the mistake imo.

Thank you everyone. I think it's too dry now but I'll remember for next time. I might try to dip the knife too, to see if that helps. As it stands, it look ok and (adult) DS won't care!

It needs to be softer so to do crumb coat if it's dragging so much. I would say give it a few seconds in the microwave as that's what I do for smbc or standard buttercream but not sure about heating cream cheese like that as I don't make cream cheese frosting.

For next time - freeze the cake first, then ice it - far less crumbs and it is so much easier to work with. It defrost quickly and will be nice and moist.

I make a lot of iced sponge cakes, at least one a week often more (I bake for a charity, I don't eat them all!), and always do this.

Thank you to everyone for such helpful tips. You are all wonderful.