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All About Buttercream | 25 Questions Answered by British Girl Bakes
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Sep 6, 2024
How do you make buttercream less sweet? Why does my buttercream taste grainy? What’s the right consistency for piping? Can I use buttercream in a hot climate? In this video I answer the 25 most commonly asked questions about my 4 Minute Buttercream. If you have any other questions, ask them in the comments and I'll try to answer them! For my 4 Minute Buttercream recipe and tutorial click here: https://www.britishgirlbakes.com/buttercream-frosting/ To read a transcribed version of this tutorial (with photos!) click here: http://www.britishgirlbakes.com/all-about-buttercream/ For my online cake decorating school click here: https://britishgirlbakes.teachable.com/ SUBSCRIBE to my channel for new cake decorating tutorials every week! If you buy any of the products I've linked out to, the price you pay won't change but I will make a small commission on anything you buy. Thank you for helping to keep the British Girl Bakes tutorials FREE!
View Video Transcript
0:00
Definitely the question that I'm asked the most often is how I make the frosting for my cakes
0:04
And the answer is my four minute buttercream and I have a recipe for it on my website and a very detailed tutorial
0:09
But I thought it would be useful to put together a video answering all of those questions
0:13
which hopefully you'll find helpful. I suppose you could make butter cream without a mixer
0:21
You'd have to have a lot of arm strength and also a lot of patience. If you have a handheld mixer, you could use that instead of a stand mixer
0:28
It's just a bit more of a labour and time. intensive process. Even though it's only supposed to take four minutes to do the mixing
0:33
holding the mixer with your hand and moving it through the thick butter and sugar
0:37
for that length of time is actually really exhausting. So possible with a handheld mixer
0:41
wouldn't recommend it, and maybe possible without a mixer at all. Yes, absolutely. I use salted and unsalted butter interchangeably, but if you do it with
0:52
salted butter, just don't add the salt that's in the recipe. Yes, you can from a consistent
0:59
point of view, it will taste different. The taste that butter gives the butter cream is
1:03
really unique and the flavour of margarine and shortening is a little bit different. So if you've
1:08
ever tasted butter made with actual butter, I'm sure you will be able to taste the difference
1:12
when it's made with something else. Every butter seems to have a different colour. I don't
1:18
have a particular brand that I use. I'm living in North America at the moment and the butter
1:22
that I've owned the supermarket is quite a light colour compared to butter that I've used in
1:26
England and I'm sure it varies from country to country and brand to brand. If you mix the
1:31
butter on its own in the mixing bowl for a few minutes before you start the process of making the
1:34
butter cream, it should lighten the butter a little bit and then you'll end up with more of a
1:38
white colour. Definitely use powdered sugar, not normal baking sugar, casta sugar, granulated sugar
1:46
white sugar. It does need to be powdered sugar and it should say somewhere on the packaging
1:50
that it's 10x powdered sugar which just means that it's been sifted 10 times so it's a really
1:55
really fine powdered sugar and if you use one that isn't as fine you'll notice a
2:00
different in the texture of your buttercream. A lot of people ask if you can just reduce the
2:06
amount of sugar in the recipe to make the buttercream less sweet and although that's possible to a
2:10
certain extent and I'll explain it in a second unfortunately this type of buttercream is just a
2:15
very sweet buttercream so if you don't like sweet butter creams I would recommend trying something else
2:19
you could try a meringue based butter cream or a ganache but this buttercream does rely on the sugar. The reason
2:25
for stability it's what keeps buttercream firm and that gives it its shape when you're
2:29
frosting or when you're piping so you could reduce the amount of sugar a little bit and then
2:34
with it also reduce the amount of milk or cream and that way it will still have a similar consistency
2:40
but if you take too much of it away it'll become very liquid and it will just slide off your cake
2:45
and your piping won't hold its form no a whisk attachment won't work for this butter
2:52
It does have to be a paddle attachment or a beater. And the reason is because you don't want to incorporate a lot of air into the butchream
2:58
because then it will get air bubbles. And the paddle attachment mixes it really well without doing that
3:04
A whisk, the entire purpose of it is to incorporate air, so don't use one of those
3:12
It isn't necessary for this recipe. If you want to beat it for longer, there shouldn't be a problem with it
3:17
as long as you keep the mixer on its lowest setting. And as long as you're using a paddle attachment
3:22
and not a whisk attachment. But it's not necessary. If you beat it for just a minute after each
3:27
addition of the sugar, that will be enough time to incorporate the sugar and the butter together
3:31
and then once you add the liquid at the end, it will be the perfect consistency. You really don't need to beat it for longer. If after you've mixed your butter cream, you notice little
3:41
white lumps in the butter cream, very small, like little specks, so when you frost your cake
3:46
maybe you'll see little white dots in it. The reason for that is that the butter hasn't been
3:51
completely left to come to room temperature. So the butter is a little bit too cold
3:54
And then when you add the sugar to the butter it forms these little hard granules It an absolute pain There no way to get rid of them other than removing them one by one and you have hundreds in a batch of butter cream So it really really important to let the butter come to room temperature before you start the process of making the butter cream
4:11
The buttercream definitely shouldn't taste grainy. You shouldn't notice any texture. It should be very silky, very smooth
4:18
And the reason for that is that the butter and the sugar should completely incorporate to make a smooth butter cream
4:23
If you do notice a gritty or a grainy texture, that's from the sugar, not the sugar, not
4:28
from the butter and it's either because you haven't sifted the sugar. Sometimes sugar
4:32
comes pre-sifted so I actually don't sift the brand the type I but if you find that
4:36
there are clumps in it you really do need to sift it. The other reason is unfortunately
4:41
just the type of sugar that you're using it might not be the 10x the 10 times sifted
4:45
aced sugar powdered sugar so if you try making another batch and you sift the sugar and
4:50
it still tastes gritty or grainy it's just the brand of the sugar that you're using
4:55
So I've had a lot of people ask me about this and I've suggested they try to different brand and they do and then they have fantastic results so I know it's not
5:02
the solution you want to hear but try a different brand of sugar and hopefully everything will work perfectly. Butter is a yellow product naturally it does
5:11
lighten when you mix it and some brands are lighter than others but when you
5:15
finish making the buttercream if your butter cream still has too much of a yellowish tinge for what you're looking for it sounds a little bit strange but
5:21
use a teeny tiny bit of violet food colour you can just dip a toothpick into the
5:26
bottle of colour and then to put a really tiny bit to start with, stir it all together and
5:31
the violet takes away the yellow tinge and it will make your buttercream look really bright white
5:37
If you have air bubbles in your buttercream, it's because you've incorporated too much air
5:41
into it, which usually happens when you beat the buttercream at too high of a speed. It
5:45
really needs to be on the lowest speed of your mixer. And if it isn't because of that
5:50
then it could be because you are using a whisk instead of a paddle or a beta attachment
5:56
If you do have air bubbles in your buttercream, you can try and fix it. Put the buttercream in a big bowl and really slap it around in the bowl
6:03
So really aggressively stir it, knock the buttercream against the sides of the bowl
6:07
and that will knock the air out of the buttercream and the more you stir it, the smoothie you'll notice it getting
6:15
I'd suggest adding the milk or cream to the butter cream at the end of the recipe
6:18
just a tablespoon at a time so you can observe how the consistency of the butter cream is changing as you add the liquid
6:24
because once you make the buttercream too liquid, it's very difficult to get it to go back to the right consistency
6:29
You'd have to add even more sugar and then it would become really sweet. There are a few ways to test the consistency that I like to use
6:37
The first is just pull your spatula through the bowl of buttercream and observe the trail that the spatula leaves behind
6:44
It should be a completely smooth pathway behind the spatula. So both the buttercream trail itself should be smooth but also the edges of it should be really smooth
6:52
When the butter cream is too stiff, you'll notice there are lots of little holes behind the pathway that your spatula's left
6:59
And that's where the butter cream's broken away from itself and it's because it's so stiff that the spatula is tearing it as you pull it
7:05
And also the edges of the pathway of the butter cream, you'll see that they're really shaggy, rugged peaks, where the butter cream has, again, almost split apart
7:14
And that's because it's really too stiff. So you have to add a lot more milk or cream, but just a tablespoon at a time
7:19
So you can see how it does with each tablespoon. The second way I like to do, way I like to test it is to scoop up a little bit of buttercream on my spatula and then just
7:26
gently tap the spatula on the side of the bowl, just tap it once or twice and see if the butter cream
7:31
falls off. This will vary from person to person depending on how firmly they tap the spatula on the
7:37
bowl but for me it usually comes off by the second tap and that shows me that it's the right consistency
7:42
If the butter cream is still clinging onto your spatula, it's far too stiff and if when you lift the
7:46
spatula up from the bowl the buttercream slides straight off the spatula then it's definitely too runny
7:52
When you frost a cake, it's essential that your butter cream is the right consistency
7:57
Otherwise you have a nightmare crumb coating the cake and a nightmare trying to get the final coated frosting smooth So you can test the butter cream when it in the bowl before you even start frosting your cake using the methods that I mentioned by dragging your spatula through the bowl and also scooping up some buttercream and tapping it on the side of the bowl and seeing when
8:14
it falls off. But you can also test it as you're frosting in the cake. So the way to do that would
8:19
be put the buttercream on your offset spatula and start to spread this onto the cake. And if
8:23
the frosting is clinging onto the offset spatula instead of gliding onto the cake, then you know
8:28
your buttercream's too stiff and you need to add more liquid. It should should spread really easily, like very soft butter spreading onto a piece of bread
8:36
And your spatula should glide around the cake, and then you should be able to swipe your offset
8:40
spatula right off the cake, and it should leave the buttercream behind. It'll leave a little
8:44
peak as you, as you swipe the spatula off, but the buttercream will stay behind on the cake
8:48
It won't pull off with your spatula. It's much more common that buttercream is too
8:52
stiff rather than too loose or too runny. If it is too loose, when you spread it onto the cake
8:57
over the top surface of the cake. Instead of sticking out over the sides of the cake
9:02
it will slide right down the sides of the cake rather than staying in that smooth top layer
9:06
at the top. And in that case, I would just recommend turning that into your crumb coat
9:11
spread it very thinly all over the cake, let it set, add a bit more sugar to your buttercream
9:16
and beat it again until it gets thicker, and then use that for your final coat of frosting
9:22
I usually use the same consistency of buttercream for frosting a cake or piping. The exception is for
9:27
Russian tips where it needs to be maybe a little bit stiffer. So to do that you can either
9:32
add a little bit more icing sugar and then stir it together again. Or the other thing you can do
9:37
is put the frosting in a piping bag, put it in the freezer for one minute, set a timer for one
9:42
minute so you don't forget. And then when you take it out to the freezer, do a test flour and that should be the right consistency. And I have a lot of details on how to pipe
9:50
with Russian tips in my tutorial on Russian tips with a few other tips and tricks of how to use those
9:57
The only time when I would recommend correcting the consistency of butter cream because it's too loose or too runny by putting it in the fridge is if you're really confident that that problem has been caused by heat
10:09
So if you know that the consistency of the butter cream was correct, it had the right balance of sugar and butter and milk or cream and the consistency was fine, but then maybe you piped with it and you put it in a piping bag and you took a really long time piping your cake and your hands are really warm or it's a really hot day and you noticed that the butter cream started to
10:27
to get runnier. In that situation you could put it in the freezer for, if it's in a piping
10:33
bag I wouldn't do it for more than one minute. If it's in the bowl you could maybe try two
10:37
minutes, stir it around and then try and use it again and see if the consistency is better
10:41
But if the consistency is too loose because there's too much liquid in the buttercream
10:45
because you added too much milk or cream or maybe you added a liquid flavor ingredient like
10:49
strawberry puree or lemon curd and you added too much and the butter cream became too runny
10:55
in that situation I wouldn't recommend putting it in the free. or freeze it because the temperature of the butter cream is not going to fix the consistency
11:04
Yes, you can. I started baking and decorating cakes in Costa Rica, which has pretty extreme summers
11:10
especially at the beach, and I used this butter cream and I never had any problems. There are
11:15
a few precautions you could take, and there is a substitution you can make. The precautions are
11:20
if you're going to serve a cake outside on a hot day, keep the cake in the fridge until you serve it
11:25
or until you have to display it outside so that it stays cold for as long as possible
11:29
Also keep it in the fridge until you transport it because a cold cake is going to resist the vibrations and the movements of travel
11:36
a lot better than a cake at room temperature. Then if you have had the cake in the fridge until you take it outside
11:41
even if it sits outside for an hour or two before you eat it, hopefully that would be enough time for it to go from being cold
11:47
just to room temperature rather than completely melting in the heat. If you put any cake with any frosting in full sunlight on a hot day with no breeze
11:56
it's probably not going to last very long and this buttercream isn't an exception
12:00
But you can make the buttercream even more stable than it already is
12:04
by switching out the butter for shortening a vegetable shortening so Crisco Trex there are lots of different brands I can personally taste the flavour I talk about that in a second So what you could do is you could switch half of the butter out for the vegetable shortening and leave the other half
12:18
And that way the buttercream will stand up a little bit better to the heat. I did find in Costa Rica
12:23
this is a really strange thing I stumbled across, but if I had to make a cake or cupcakes
12:27
to sit outside in the heat for a long period of time and I switched out half of the butter for
12:32
shortening, if you add a teaspoon of artificial vanilla essence for every batch of buttercream
12:38
still keeping the original measurements of the real vanilla extract in the recipe. For some reason
12:43
the artificial vanilla essence takes away the shortening flavour. It's a very strange thing. I don't
12:48
know the science behind it. It's just something I found that worked. To make chocolate buttercream
12:54
you can either add cocoa powder mixed with a bit of liquid, or you can add melted semi-sweet
12:58
chocolate or you can add both. I have my favourite recipe for that on british girlbakes.com
13:03
and there's a video tutorial as well if you're looking for my recipe. I use gel colours. I don't have just one brand that I use. I've tried Wilton
13:13
AmeriColor and Chefmaster and I really like all of them. And the advantage of
13:17
gel colours over liquid colours is that they're really concentrated so you don't have to use a
13:21
lot to get really bright colours. Apply them just a few drops at a time because they do work
13:25
really quickly, but you do have to use quite a lot of them to get very dark colours, like a dark
13:30
purple or red or black. So just keep adding them bit by bit. And then when you think you've got
13:35
a colour similar to the shade that you want, maybe a little bit lighter, cover the bowl with
13:39
cling film, saran wrap, a lid, and leave it for 30 minutes and then check it again, because with
13:44
time and exposure to air, the colour starts to darken. So your colour will probably get a few shades
13:49
darker in that time. So if you're trying to get an exact colour match, I would definitely go a little
13:54
bit lighter than you want the end result to be. My four minute butter cream is what's
14:01
called a crusting butter cream, which means because of the amount of sugar in it, when it's exposed
14:05
to air, it will eventually crust, which means it just forms a harder surface. I exaggerate this by
14:11
putting cakes in the fridge so that the buttercream sets really hard, and that lets me do all sorts of
14:15
decorating techniques, like decorating with acetate transfers, stenciling, carving buttercream, and all of these techniques really rely on having a very firm buttercream
14:25
But you can just leave the buttercream at room temperature. It will still form a crust on the outside but it won't get as hard as it does when it's in the fridge
14:32
If you do put your cake in the fridge and it gets that very hard frosting, when you take it out of the fridge and you leave it to come to room temperature before you serve it
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the buttercream will soften again. Because of the amount of sugar in the butter cream, you can leave it at room
14:46
temperature longer than you might leave a cup of milk at room temperature. At room temperature, sealed properly, which means covering it tightly with cling film or saran wrap or a lid
14:55
Buttercream is fine for two to three days. It does need to be covered because if it's exposed to the air, it will crust on the outside
15:01
and then when you stir the buttercream, you'll get little chunks of crusted buttercream within it
15:08
You can put butter cream in the fridge. The same as for room temperature, it's really important to seal it properly
15:13
and then you can leave it in the fridge for a week or up to two weeks. You can freeze buttercream. I like to do it in a Ziploc bag because it's easier to fit in the freezer than a big topware or bowl, but you can do it however you like as long as it's a sealed container
15:29
When you are ready to use it, take it out two or three hours beforehand so that it has time to thaw and come to room temperature and then put it in a bowl and stir it and if it still has lumps of hard buttercream in it, wait for about another hour just to make sure that it's all at room temperature
15:44
and then you'll notice that the butter cream looks quite air bubbly, so stir it a few times before you use it to knock those out and then it will be perfectly smooth and it will behave the same way as if you'd never frozen it or put it in the fridge in the first place
16:00
I hope I've answered all of your questions about my four minute butter cream. You can find the recipe and video tutorial on how to make it and check the consistency and add other flavours on british galbakes.com. Thank you so much for watching
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