I am making a red velvet cake which will be fondant covered.  Normally I'd use a crusting cream cheese frosting and filling, but the customer doesn't like cream cheese frosting.  My second choice is the cooked flour based frosting (also called Ermine or heirloom frosting), which I also like a lot.  However, the cooked flour based frosting has a lot of milk in it and so it needs to be refrigerated, right?? And they are picking up the cake in the morning for a dinnertime event, and the customer isn't sure she will have enough refrigeration for the cake to stay cold until the party.  

So that leaves me with a choice of vanilla SMBC or white chocolate SMBC unless anyone has any better ideas. What about a cream cheese SMBC?  I have never made white chocolate SMBC so I don't know how the flavor would go with red velvet cake. 

What do you think goes best with red velvet that doesn't need to be kept cold? 

I just had lunch yesterday at The Cheesecake Factory and one of their holiday cheesecakes is a red velvet. It has layers of cake, cheesecake, and is covered in white chocolate icing (could be cream cheese). I didn't try it but some of the people at my table said it was delicious so I think your white chocolate buttercream would pair nicely with it.

HTH!

RJ

I have come across a peppermint frosting on Red Velvet for the Holidays

http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Peppermint-Red-Velvet-Cake

never tried it.  but it looks delicious.

The milk is cooked along with the flour plus there's sugar which is a preservative and I hope that makes it shelf stable. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will know for sure because I just made 2 cakes with that icing.

Well if you want to be technical, nothing should be left out for more then 4 hours according to the health dept.. You have to decide what your comfortable doing. This cooked frosting isn't the most stable frosting for decorating, it's high moisture content does keep it soft so it needs to be kept cold/cool to be firm.

Personally, I'd use a white chocolate frosting for this order. Believe it or not, white chocolate cuts the sweetness level in frosting........and add some sea salt to further cut the sweetness.

The pasteurized milk isn't the worry in the average recipe we are talking about. Typically the issue with cooked frostings are the eggs. But the recipe your referring to doesn't contain eggs. I can highly recommend the recipe from the "Baked" cookbook, it works and tastes great!

Thanks for the replies.  I ended up making a SMBC with some white chocolate ganache mixed in (not a ton) and lots of vanilla paste.  The white chocolate changes the mouth feel of the buttercream making it feel more creamy (due to the cocoa butter with its low melting point I believe), but I'm undecided if that's a good thing or not.  The flavor of the white chocolate was subtle but I think it goes well.  It is a little richer than a plain vanilla SMBC.   

I still prefer red velvet with cream cheese or the flour based frosting.  I like the flour frosting from "Baked" as well - mixing in the sugar with the flour and milk makes a lot of sense and you don't have to beat the heck out of it to make it smooth and not gritty.   It also tastes great.  But this way I know it will hold up under fondant and without refrigeration.  It's going to be cold out around here however (high temp around 40) so they could even leave it in a car to make the health dept happy. haha...  

or should I say ho ho ho?