Monday 19 March 2012

Fluffy Buttercream Icing

Hello Cake-Lovers, 



I hope you are all well and have had a fantastic Mother's Day.

This is the first of a series of posts I am going to write containing recipes/baking tips for our online followers. Media such as Twitter and Facebook have been so valuable to us in the last year, and these recipes are a little way of us helping all of those baking enthusiasts out there who follow us!

Buttercream is made by mixing one part butter with 2 parts icing sugar. We often get compliments on our buttercream, with people remarking that it is a lot lighter and fluffier than other buttercreams that they have tried. I have always been careful to ensure that our cupcakes were light, not too sweet and did not have that heavy migraine-inducing quality that some rich cakes can have. Therefore we have always used a buttercream recipe that keeps our cake topping light. The only exception to this is chocolate, where we ask clients if they would like a richer or lighter buttercream as some like a more indulgent chocolate flavour.

So what is the secret to light and fluffy buttercream? To start, make sure your butter is at room temperature. The mistake that people make is to stop mixing the buttercream when, or soon after, the icing sugar has been incorporated into the butter. NO! Keep going! In fact the buttercream should be mixed for about 10 minutes before you can begin to spread or pipe it on to your cupcakes/cake. This will make it increase in volume. Therefore a given swirl of buttercream will have be lighter, more airy, contain less butter and sugar and generally be more "whipped". Adding milk to your buttercream before blasting it in the mixer also gives it a much lighter, softer texture so be sure to add some milk to your mixture.

I hope that this recipe has been useful. If there is another recipe you would like me to blog, please let me know!

Happy baking,

The Cupcaker x




1 comment:

  1. Thanks for that, I've definitely not been beating the mixture for long enough although I always add milk. I'll give it a try next time.

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