Today on Sugar Spun Run I'll be showing you how to make vanilla buttercream frosting.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers! Today I am sharing a simple American buttercream
frosting recipe with you. This is super simple.
You've probably tasted this or made it yourself at some point. Today I'm just
sharing my tried-and-true easy recipe. Now the first thing you're going to need
is two sticks of unsalted butter, and you want this to be softened just about to
room temperature. I'm going to be using my stand mixer today
and so I'll just be adding these to the bowl of my stand mixer. You could
absolutely use a hand mixer instead if you don't have a stand mixer.
Now I'm just going to start by stirring this butter, just the butter by itself, until
it's nice and creamy. There are a lot of different kinds of buttercream frosting
recipes out there, but when most people, at least in the U.S., think of buttercream,
they're thinking of the buttercream we're making today, which is American
buttercream. This is by far the sweetest of the buttercreams, at least in my
opinion. I have a Swiss meringue buttercream that I actually prefer. I
like my cream cheese frosting because it's less sweet, but this is a great
staple and everybody should know how to make American buttercream frosting.
The next thing we'll add is our other main ingredient, powdered sugar. So you will
need four cups of powdered sugar total for this recipe. I'm going to start by
just adding about half of it to the bowl of the mixer.
I'm also going to add just a pinch of salt. I really like to use unsalted butter and then add the salt to
taste because this gives us a much better control over the flavor of our
buttercream. So I'm starting with just 1/8 teaspoon. Just sprinkle that over the
sugar. Wow we're just going to stir the sugar and butter together on low speed until they're nicely combined.
My butter is stuck on the sides of the bowl so I'm
going to scrape that down. This will help speed things up a little bit.
So once half of the sugar is combined we can just continue to run the mixer on
low to speed, and gradually add more powdered sugar until it's completely
combined, but because I'm not super patient, I like to do this little cheat where I will just add all of the remaining powdered sugar.
And now to keep my mixer. from sending a snow cloud of powdered sugar all over my kitchen, I'm just going
to take a clean dish towel and I'm just going to drape this over the top of my
mixer so that it's covering my bowl, and then I'm going to gradually increase the speed
to about medium on my mixer. You can't see what's happening in here but I promise that's a good thing.
If you are using a hand mixer for this process you
will want to make sure you just add that sugar gradually with your mixer on low speed.
Alright so we have mostly combined our frosting at this point without
sending sugar all over the kitchen. So let's go ahead and take a look at this.
As you can see, not all of the powdered sugar has been combined. We could keep
mixing until it is. That's fine if you want to, but it's not critical here. All
I'm doing at this point is I'm just going to scrape the sides and bottom of
the bowl, and now I'm going to add our two remaining ingredients. Now these
ingredients are liquid so they're going to help everything combine really nicely.
The first thing that you need is two teaspoons of vanilla extract. Now for a
more of a pure white frosting you can use clear vanilla extract. The vanilla
will tint frosting a little yellow. The butter will also do that.
We are also going to be using two to four tablespoons of heavy cream for this
recipe. I'm going to start by just adding two tablespoons of the cream, and then
we'll add more as needed. Now we'll stir everything together and remember you
want to start with your mixer on low speed.
Make sure you pause occasionally. Especially if you're using a stand mixer,
and just scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl.
Alright, now we'll stir this again and we are going to gradually increase the speed all the way up to
medium high, where we will beat our frosting for about thirty seconds.
So this frosting actually looks pretty much perfect. It's nice and smooth and creamy.
There are no lumps in it, and it's actually a pretty nice texture. I don't need to add
any more cream to this, but if you wanted a
thinner consistency, go ahead and add additional cream, about a tablespoon at a
time. Whipping for another couple of seconds after each addition until the
consistency you're looking for is reached. One great thing about this
frosting is if you ever make it too thin, you can always thicken it back up by
adding more powdered sugar, but this actually looks pretty great. I'm just
going to scrape the sides and the bottom of the bowl one more time. Make sure
everything is nicely combined. You also want to make sure that you taste your
icing at this point. If you need to add a little more salt, or a little more
vanilla extract, this is where you're going to realize that.
This is perfect. So I don't need to go any further with any more ingredients. So that is how simple
it is to make American buttercream frosting. This frosting will, this amount
of frosting, will cover a two layer 8 inch or 9 inch cake. It will cover a 9 by
13 sheet cake. It will also generously ice 12 cupcakes, or if you just want to spread the icing on top it'll cover 24.
So really that's it that's all there is to making this buttercream frosting. Super simple. It can be flavored
using different extracts if you want a flavor other than vanilla. It can be colored.
You can use gel coloring or liquid coloring. It's a very versatile very, very
easy icing recipe. If you guys try this one out, please let me know what you
think. I always love hearing from you. What's your favorite kind of frosting? I
actually would love to know. Alright thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.
It's pretty good.