A year and a half ago, I wrote up a post on
buttercreams, and even followed it up with a
sequel post.
Those still make a pretty decent study guide, but now I have a few more things to say, and that’s why we're here.
Before I begin, assume that vanilla and salt are recommended additions in general - vanilla for flavor and salt to temper the sweetness. Also, the amount of liquid beaten in at the end is completely dependent on the temperature of the room and the temperature of the frosting.
Dry additions can change the flavor (and admittedly ruin the texture a little), and these include but are not limited to espresso powder, matcha powder, chai powder, cocoa powder, pumpkin pie spice, ground freeze dried berries, and ground cookies. Thick additions like nut butters, curds, or jams can be added with discretion. They will add liquid. Now that that's out of the way, I won’t bother mentioning any of that ever again.
Group I: Butter & Sugar
We’ll begin by discussing the classic standard frosting,
American Buttercream (ABC). It requires no cooking; this is whipped butter beaten together with a tiny bit of liquid and powdered sugar. The dilemma in ABC is that to get frosting light and voluminous, the butter must be whipped a great deal, until it is very nearly white. However, to get a smooth pretty finish on a cake or a precise piping result, it ought not have too many air bubbles.
There’s no magic solution to this; the butter really does need to be whipped forever. And then the air bubbles really do need to be knocked down a bit. Some people whip the butter over low speeds for an eternity because they’re playing the long game; some people make so much buttercream that it covers the entire stand mixer paddle, which helps to keep the air above the buttercream; some people use a food processor (what?); and some people use a wooden spoon to basically macaronage the hell out of it. I tend to do the macaronage thing but give up kind of quickly. It’s also not beneath me to cheat by using a little more liquid or heat with the paddle on a low speed, but this is not an official recommendation. I don’t get too obsessive about smooth buttercream because there’s also the mouthfeel to consider. People tend to like lighter, fluffier frosting, and an air bubble in buttercream never killed anybody. The buttercream itself, maybe.
ABC gets criticized for being too sweet and too grainy. There’s no real way around the too sweet thing without getting too buttery, and the graininess is due to the fact that all that powdered sugar can’t dissolve in such a small amount of liquid. To get a smoother buttercream, some of the powdered sugar can be replaced with a thick syrup, but that yields a less stable frosting.
When shortening is used in place of some or all the butter, this is
Decorator’s Buttercream (DBC). Shortening has no water in it, and butter does, so DBC is more stable and can crust better than regular ABC. In fact, a frosting made with very little to no liquid at all will crust very hard, and this can be helpful for gingerbread house rooftops destined to be handled by toddlers, or sandwich cookie fillings that shouldn't squish outwards. Grocery store bakeries (and even regular bakeries) often use shortening in their frosting as well. While using shortening can cut down on an overly buttery taste, it will also create a greasy film in your mouth in larger amounts. Sometimes, bakeries use shortening with an artificial butter flavoring. Speaking of poor decisions, some people like
Store Bought Frosting sold in tubs. This has some mysterious ingredients in it, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Rather, it is our own judgement that deems it bad. If you want to use it to decorate and pipe with, you're going to have to stiffen it with powdered sugar and get your stand mixer dirty anyway, and that is a plan filled with shame. But we all have our own nostalgic tendencies, and if I had to eat this stuff, I would definitely make chocolate graham cracker sandwiches with rainbow chip frosting.
On the other hand, when cream cheese instead of shortening is used in place of some or all the butter, this is
Cream Cheese Frosting. While shortening has less water than butter, cream cheese has more. In fact, it has much, much more. The higher the cream cheese to butter ratio you use, the more you will need to give up on all those piping dreams and be contented with soft falling swirls created with a butter knife. This approach is purely based on taste, and I respect it.
If you're hell-bent on a cream cheese frosting that tastes a lot like cream cheese and will also support layers of cake, you will have to do weird things to get
Firm Cream Cheese Frosting. The weird things are some combination of cooking the water out of the cream cheese and using milk powder as a thickener. This is a pain because milk powder can be clumpy, so there's a new headache. You can hydrate and dissolve it, adding even more water to your frosting, or sift the living daylights out of your milk powder, or strain your frosting, adding a lot more labor and mess. Good luck.
When I said to add cookie crumbs to your buttercream, you might have wondered if there was one I had in mind. Well, what goes best with cookies? Coffee. But that's me, and the public says "milk."
Russian Buttercream (RBC) is nothing more than whipped butter emulsified with sweetened condensed milk. It's milky and has a stronger depth of flavor than ABC, but it's less stable. If you're teaching your kid how to make a frosting and you don't want powdered sugar all over your kitchen, start here. Seriously, a 14 oz can of sweetened condensed milk and two sticks of butter and you're good to go. (I mean, it's an emulsion, so do take your time.) Grab a sleeve of Thin Mints and bang them out with a rolling pin. Or whatever - be creative.
Group II: Melted Butter Candy & Sugar
Chocolate American Buttercream is made with raw cocoa powder. To get a smoother chocolate buttercream, untempered melted and cooled chocolate can be added to whipped butter and powdered sugar to yield
Chocolate Buttercream. This makes a really great frosting, but I get the impression that the public likes the sweeter, lighter, vanilla & cocoa flavor of the former. I guess you could always try using a milk chocolate in your Chocolate Buttercream, but what a waste that would be. My chocolate buttercream uses 70% or higher, and so it shall continue. Something about beating milk chocolate into powdered sugar simply hurts my feelings.
Chocolate has the power to combat sweetness, eradicate graininess, and further stabilize buttercream. Chocolate also tastes and feels like chocolate. In my book, that’s called a quadruple win. The public clearly disagrees and orders vanilla buttercream almost every single time. And that's fine by me; it's easier on my watch and my pocketbook.
When chocolate is melted into butter, this is known as
Butter Ganache. When Butter Ganache (or even a mixture of melted butter and cocoa powder) is beaten with powdered sugar and a bit of milk or cream, this is
Chocolate Fudge Frosting. Similarly, when Butter Ganache is beaten with powdered sugar and sour cream, this is
Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting. That makes sense because regular
Sour Cream Frosting is sour cream beaten into ABC. I could have put that into Group I, but there were more important things to tell you at the time.
Similar in construction to Chocolate Fudge Frosting or Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting is
Caramel Frosting. First, a caramel is made with butter, brown sugar, and milk. Then it's whipped with powdered sugar and a bit of milk or cream. I pretty much like everything about Group II better than Group I, but who gets the headlines? American Buttercream and Cream Cheese Frosting, that's who.
Group III: Butter & Pudding
What if you really want something that's not too buttery and not too sweet? There's really only one answer to that, and it's
Ermine Frosting. You make a really bad pudding of milk, flour, and sugar, and then cool it. Then you emulsify whipped butter with the gelatinous mess you just made and can barely stand to look at. I think it's a very cool frosting because it's less sweet and so retro, but it's definitely milky, and when starch molecules burst, they get kind of gummy, and that's a little weird.
So what if you wanted to try improving upon that, and you made a really good pudding instead of a really bad one? Say, a standard crème pât? Well, that would be
German Buttercream (GBC). It has the same problems as the bad pudding one; starch molecules have been burst, after all. In fact, I might even like Ermine more. Not the best use of tempering eggs.
These two are by no means bad buttercreams. They're not great for finishing a cake, but I think they make for the most elegant of fillings. They're not popular enough to warrant all the extra work on a regular basis, but I could easily see myself choosing to work with one of them when I'm "in one of my moods."
Group IV: Butter & Beaten Sugared Eggs
All the bakers on the television shows have a favorite frosting, and that is
Swiss Meringue Buttercream (SMBC). Beautifully smooth and fluffy, this is considered the silkiest frosting to robe a cake in. SMBC, as the name implies, is whipped butter emulsified with Swiss meringue - a meringue in which the sugar has dissolved into the egg whites over a double boiler before whipping. I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon and play The Emperor's New Clothes here - I think SMBC is too buttery. You can frost a cake with straight up Swiss meringue, but it's very soft; butter, when cooled, firms up so well. Were I to make SMBC for myself, I might use only half the butter recommended. Nobody else does this. I don't know why I'm alone here.
Because SMBC is all the rage, there's also a shortcut. It's
Sawsen's Egg Free Swiss Buttercream (SEBC), which is just an ABC with protein powder in it. It sort of belongs in the first group, but as it's an imitation of SMCB, I stuck it down here.
I bet you can guess what I'm going to talk about next -
Italian Meringue Buttercream (IMBC)! This one is sturdier than its Swiss counterpart, and as you already know or have undoubtedly guessed, it's an emulsification of whipped butter and Italian Meringue. For Italian meringue, you need to whip whites and make sugar syrup simultaneously, so that you reach soft peaks in your whites and the softball stage in your syrup at the same time. That's a little tricky, but if you can eat your avocados or bananas when they're ripe and not overripe, you definitely already have the skillset. You just have to keep an eye out.
As with SMBC, I think IMBC is too buttery. However, because Italian Meringue is firmer than Swiss Meringue, I love using the Italian Meringue without butter as
Marshmallow Frosting! I stabilize mine with just a spoonful of marshmallow fluff, which has a bit of gelatin in it. It's so shiny and smooth and fun. Swiss Meringue on its own is also called Marshmallow Frosting, but I'm an Italian Meringue Marshmallow Lady (IMML) through and through.
The controversy over IMBC is that some people say the whites are cooked from the hot syrup and some people say they can't be sure, so then they exaggerate and call the whites "raw." Come on. I don't know what happens to them, but they are not raw.
Korean Glossy Buttercream (KBC) at first glance looks like IMBC gone wrong due to using cold butter instead of the usual room temperature. The cold butter purposely does not emulsify with the Italian meringue, and then a bunch of water leeches out, and y'all, it looks gross. Then you keep beating it until the water goes back into the buttercream, and the moment it's absorbed, bam! KBC. It's not only glossy, but also slightly transparent. I actually don't think it looks appetizing at all, but it is beautiful, particularly in fancy piping. KBC piped flowers kind of look like wax or plastic, and they're dazzling. Look up a youtube of KBC piping and tell me you're not hypnotized.
We just discussed three buttercreams with egg whites, but what about whole eggs or egg yolks? So glad you asked. When you whip those up with sugar and heat, and whip that into whipped butter, you get
French Buttercream (FBC). Traditionally, the soft ball stage syrup of the Italian method is used, but the double boiler from the Swiss method works too. Frankly, I think it's too rich and heavy. I do use it in opera cakes, but that's only because I can be a bit of a purist. It's just gorgeous to make. If you have any sort of heart, the color on that pâte à bombe (the yolk meringue thing) should make you weak in the knees.
Group V: Whipping Cream
Let's talk about the lightest of all frostings,
Stabilized Whipped Cream. You can stabilize your whipped cream with all sorts of things, from gelatin to starch to yogurt to cream cheese, but don't. Pay the big bucks for mascarpone and never look back. The recipes out there will tell you that you don't need a lot of powdered sugar to sweeten whipped cream, and that's true. But it's also true that Cool Whip and Reddi Whip haven't filed for bankruptcy, and those are... pretty sweet. I personally don't skimp on the sugar, which also contains some starch (stabilizer) due to its anti-caking properties.
Chocolate Ganache is my favorite frosting of all time. It is simply whisked chocolate and hot cream. I like it un-whipped best, and it yields the smoothest piping lines. Whipped chocolate ganache is lighter in color and lovely as well, and looks more like a traditional frosting. The consistency of either has everything to do with temperature.
Speaking of consistency, thinner ganaches are chocolate icings or glazes, and not frostings at all. The glossy ones (donuts, eclairs) typically get their sheen from added corn syrup.
Group VI: Not a Frosting
And then there was
German Chocolate Frosting. This one isn't chocolate at all; nor is it frosting! Rather, it's nothing more than a thick crème pât studded with toasted pecans and coconut. I couldn't leave it off the list, because without it, we wouldn't have German Chocolate Cake, and only a negligent baker could imagine a world without German Chocolate Cake.
Family Favorites
Just in case you were curious.
George - Vanilla Almond American Buttercream
Lan - Dark Chocolate Ganache
Drakeson - Marshmallow Frosting
Milli - Stabilized Whipped Cream with Cocoa
I'm also partial to making maple or pumpkin spice frostings with a salted caramel frosting base.
Until next time,
LL
Marshmallow Frosting (Italian Meringue)
