Another triumph

The little chocolate cake for my mom came out divinely: two layers, medium weight chocolate, delightful white Italian meringue icing garnished with shaved bits of very bittersweet chocolate.
I make this kind of icing frequently for cakes, since people around here really like it. My old copy of The Joy of Cooking calls it by this exotic-sounding name, but it's basically egg whites beaten stiff, then beaten more as you slowly pour hot sugar syrup cooked to about 225 degrees F over them, producing, if you haven't overcooked the syrup, a meringue-y concoction which is easily applied to the cake layers, and which sets up a bit as it cools. It's relatively simple, but if one overcooks the syrup, disaster may occur in the form of: the syrup seizing up and wrapping itself in glasslike strands around the beaters; or the icing sets up like concrete on the cake, especially if the sugar used in the syrup was all white. A friend of mine had this latter scenario happen, and they had to dig the cake out from under the rockhard icing. It looked like one of those amorphous buildings created by architects messing about with cement.
Our cake was divine, however, and of course it HAD to be tested this morning to see how it fared overnight...