Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'm showing you how to make a strawberry buttercream frosting,
two different ways. Hey Sugar Spun
Bakers, Sam here. And today I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well
researched, and perfected recipe. Actually,
today, I am sharing two recipes. I am showing you two
different ways to make a strawberry buttercream.
Now, what I'm going to be showing you is how to make today's recipe using fresh strawberries
and how to make this buttercream using freeze-dried strawberries.
When I first started developing this recipe, I was really trying to find the best
way to make strawberry buttercream.
And I wasn't sure if that was going to be with fresh berries or not. After a ton of deliberation,
I really could not decide which one I like better,
so today I'm sharing both with you. Now, for starters,
let me show you how to make this frosting using fresh berries.
Now to make this using fresh strawberries, you are going to need 4 ounces
of quartered strawberries with the stems removed.
I actually usually weigh them before I quarter them.
Now we're going to add these to a small saucepan,
and we're also going to add just a little bit of water.
Now what we're doing on the saucepan is we're going to cook
these down to a really concentrated mixture,
it's going to be similar to a paste. We're going to be cooking all the water out of the berries,
really, so it might seem a little bit counterintuitive to add that splash of water,
but what I've found is that if you try to cook the berries as they are,
they're going to start to burn to the bottom of the pan.
So until you get those juices flowing and the berries
releasing those juices, you need a little bit of water to keep them from burning.
Ultimately, we’ll end up cooking off this water, so it'll all end well.
Now I cook these berries over medium, sometimes
medium low heat because you don't want to cook them too fast.
And I'm just going to stir them pretty frequently, almost constantly,
until they begin to release their juices.
So you can see here that the berries have softened,
they might look a little bit more plump, and I've got a lot of juice going on in here.
So at this point, what I like to do is I like to grab a potato masher,
and I'm just going to mash these berries.
You don't want to have any large pieces of berry remaining.
You want these to be really well mashed. Now an alternative to mashing the
berries like this, would be to process the strawberries in a food processor
until you have a puree, before you start cooking them down.
But I prefer this method because you get small bits of real strawberry in the frosting
when it's done this way,
but they're not too big that it won't be able to fit through a large piping tip.
I just think the end result frosting just looks better when it's done this way.
So at this point, I like to turn up the heat just a notch,
and I'm going to stir constantly.
And I'm going to cook until I've cooked a lot of that water out of the mixture.
I want to have, like I said earlier, basically a strawberry
paste. And you gotta keep this moving,
otherwise, it's going to burn to the bottom of the pan.
If you do notice that—if your strawberries start to like burn or cook to the bottom of the pan,
you can add another splash of water to loosen them,
but you don't want to keep doing this
because, remember, the ultimate goal is to cook the water out of there.
All right, so our strawberry mixture has greatly reduced in volume.
This is nice and thick. It's going to continue to thicken as it cools,
so what I'm going to do is I'm going to transfer it to a heatproof container,
or just a glass bowl in this instance.
Now I want this to cool completely before I use it to make my
frosting, so I'm just going to pop it in the fridge and let it cool down there.
Now this strawberry reduction is not going to take too long to cool
because it is such a small amount.
So let's go ahead and start preparing our buttercream.
I like to use my stand mixer for this recipe,
but you can use a hand mixer instead. Now
to the bowl of my mixer, I'm going to add one cup of softened, unsalted butter.
And normally, if you're making frosting,
what I tell you to do is to very gradually
add the sugar to the butter. But if I'm doing this with my stand mixer,
and I don't have a lot of patience, I'm going to show you the trick that I like
to do where I add all of the sugar all at once
and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. You'll also be adding a teaspoon of vanilla extract. And my cheat trick,
when I'm using a mixer, is that I'll just take a clean towel
and I'll drape this over the mixer making sure the bowl is entirely covered.
And then we can slowly increase the heat on the mixer until everything is well combined.
All right, let's take a look. So we still have a little bit of powdered sugar spill,
but I still think this method is much easier and neater than adding the sugar gradually,
which is my official recommendation.
All right, now we do need to scrape the sides
and bottom of the bowl because some of that powdered sugar has settled there.
And we'll stir again. And once everything is nicely combined,
you'll want to grab that strawberry reduction. This is nice and cool now,
and we're just going to add this in. Now slowly increase your mixer speed,
and just stir until that jam is well incorporated.
And once again, I always have to scrape the sides
and bottom of the bowl to really get that frosting nicely combined.
All right, this is looking pretty good. See those beautiful strawberry flecks in there?
This is why I like to use the potato masher method,
it just makes such a pretty buttercream. Now
I am going to put this in a piping bag, and I fitted this one with an 848 piping tip—
I'm sorry, this is my 849 piping tip.
And I'm just going to set this aside
for now because I want to show you how this frosting stacks up to the
one made with the freeze-dried strawberries.
Speaking of which, let's go ahead and make the freeze dried strawberry buttercream right now.
Now, for this method, you are going to need one cup of freeze-dried strawberries.
Now, these need to be ground to a fine powder and easiest way to do that is to use a food processor.
I'm using my little handheld food processor that I love.
So we'll just add the berries to the basin.
Put this on top. And just pulse this until you just have a powder left.
Let's take a look at that. You don't want to have any strawberry clumps.
All right, now we're going to be going back to our stand mixer. And in the bowl of our stand mixer,
we're going to combine, again, one cup of softened, unsalted butter, 4 cups of powdered sugar,
again—these recipes are very similar—
one teaspoon of vanilla extract,
1/8 teaspoon of salt, and we will add our strawberry powder.
Now, this is going to be a little bit trickier to combine using my towel trick,
but I'm still going to go ahead
and give it a shot, even though I'm probably going to have to do a lot of scraping of the
bowl once they go to check it.
All right, well this one did make a little bit more of a mess.
That's fine. And you can see it is a dryer mixture than the last one.
And because this is a dry frosting,
we're going to need a thin it out a little bit. You'll want to
have about 4 tablespoons of heavy cream,
and we're just going to gradually add that until you have
a nice a spreadable consistency. You want the frosting to be thin enough to pipe,
but you don't want it to be so thin that it's watery or soupy.
Now, for me, I always seem to need 3 tablespoons of heavy cream
and that always seems to do the trick. We’ll mix everything together again.
There you go that helps take care of the dryness. And now, this frosting is beautiful in its own way:
it has that really vibrant pink, pink color that you can get without adding food coloring
and I just love that.
Of course, I'm going to pour this into a piping bag
too so I can show you how it stacks up to the other frosting,
and this one I have fitted with my 848 tip,
which is my favorite tip, but I only have one of them,
otherwise I would be using the same tip on both bags.
All right, now I wanted to quickly tell you about the differences in these two frostings.
The one we've made with fresh berries is a little bit softer.
It's not going to hold up to the heat quite as well.
No frosting really holds up to the heat,
but this one just is a little bit more prone to melting.
And even with the heat from the lights that I'm standing under right now,
I can kind of tell it's softening a little
bit, but it's—but it's still going to be nice and pipeable.
This frosting is just going to be a little bit more sturdy.
Again, all frosting is going to melt in the heat.
But if you are trying to serve these outdoors, this one might be your better bet.
Now let's go ahead and pipe them on some cupcakes.
All right, I think you can see both of these piped
absolutely beautifully. They're both beautiful in their own way.
You can use either of these methods for beautiful, foolproof
strawberry buttercream. I would love for you to try both of these out.
Let me know which one you like better, but again, you really can't go wrong either way.
Thank you guys so much for watching today's super easy recipe,
and if you try it out, please let me know what you think.
I'll see you next time.
This one has a slightly fresher flavor.
While this one still has a very distinct and beautiful strawberry taste.
You're going to love either one.