Today on Sugar Spun Run I'll be showing you how to make chocolate buttercream frosting.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers! Today I'm sharing a chocolate
version of my classic American buttercream frosting. I shared that video
a little while ago. A lot of you have asked me how to make it a chocolate
version. It's very simple. So today I'm going to show you exactly how to do just
that. Now I'm going to be using my stand mixer today, you could do this with a hand
mixer ,or using a hand mixer instead, either is completely fine. Now the first
ingredient that you'll need is two sticks or one cup of unsalted butter, and you
want this to be softened to room temperature. I'm going to be adding these to the bowl of my stand mixer.
Now I really love using unsalted butter in
most of my recipes because we'll be adding the salt to taste. Now this gives
us better control over the amount of salt in our recipe and more importantly over the taste of our icing.
Now let's go ahead and just cream this butter with our mixer until it's smooth and creamy.
Now you want to cream the butter first because if it's not completely softened, what could happen is you could
have some butter lumps in there that are just kind of hard to beat out of the frosting. You
can end up with a slightly lumpy frosting that can be hard to pipe so
we're just going to cream the butter first.
Now our butter looks pretty good so let's move on to our next ingredient, the
powdered sugar. You will need three and a half cups of powdered sugar for this
recipe. To start I'm just going to add about half of this into the bowl of my stand mixer.
Nw we're going to be using cocoa powder to make this buttercream
into a chocolate buttercream. You can use either natural or Dutch processed cocoa,
either is fine, today I'm using a natural cocoa powder.
Now if you really want to enhance the chocolate flavor here, a pinch of espresso powder would be a
great addition. I'm not going to be adding that today but I am going to be
adding a pinch of salt. This is just 1/8 teaspoon of salt, and you can see I got a little cocoa powder in there.
I'm also going to be adding our vanilla extract.
Even though this is a chocolate buttercream the vanilla gives you a nice
depth of flavor. It just wouldn't have quite the same flavor if you left out
this flavoring, and this is just a teaspoon and a half of vanilla extract.
We're also going to be adding some heavy cream to this recipe. Now you'll need
about 2 to 4 tablespoons of heavy cream total, but for starters we're just going to add two tablespoons.
If you don't have heavy cream, milk will work instead, but since milk is thinner you'll want to
start with just a little bit less. Start with just one tablespoon of milk. You'll
want to start mixing all of your ingredients together on low speed this
is to keep the sugar and the cocoa powder from flying all over your kitchen.
If you're using a hand mixer you definitely want to keep the mixer on low
speed. Trust me. Now if you're using a stand mixer you
can use my favorite trick which is to take a clean kitchen towel and just
drape it over the mixer and the bowl, and then still you want to start with your
mixer on low speed but you can gradually increase the speed to medium.
Alright, let's take a look at it.
So far so good. So if you're using a hand mixer you will
just keep your mixer on low speed and gradually add more powdered sugar. I am
going to just add the rest of my powdered sugar here because I'm going to
use my towel trick, and even though we are using a stand mixer here and we're
using this fancy towel trick, I do still recommend adding the sugar in two parts
because otherwise your towel will be covered in powdered sugar and you take
it off it'll just be a mess. So I still recommend adding the sugar in parts.
Alright so everything is pretty much combined. As you can probably tell from
looking at it, we're not quite done yet. There's some sugars stuck to the bottom.
So I'm going to just take my spatula and scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl
and then we'll mix everything again.
Now here's where you'll decide if you need to add more heavy cream or not. This
frosting is pretty stiff and I want a thinner frosting. I want it to be better
for spreading because I'm going to be using it on a layer cake so I'm going to
add additional heavy cream. I'm just going to add a tablespoon at a time.
So we'll start with one tablespoon and I will gradually increase my mixer speed
from low to high and just whip that cream in there for about 15 seconds on high speed.
And whipping the cream in there does lighten the color of your
frosting for sure, just something to keep in mind if you're looking for a particular color to your frosting.
So this I actually want to make a little bit thinner,
and you do want to taste-test your frosting. This could use
a little bit more salt so I'm going to add just another pinch of salt as well.
Alright this is actually perfect for me. The taste is good. The texture is silky
smooth and just perfect for spreading over a cake. If you would like you can
absolutely add a little bit more cream, another tablespoon at a time, or if you
make your frosting accidentally too thin you can add more powdered sugar. So it's
pretty hard to mess this one up, but this is perfect for me so I'm going to go ahead and spread it on a cake now.
Now this chocolate buttercream recipe will
frost a two layer eight inch, or 9-inch round cake. It'll frost a nine by
thirteen inch sheet cake. It will also generously frost a dozen cupcakes, or if
you're just spreading the frosting on top it'll cover 24 cupcakes.
And that is how easy it is to make a chocolate buttercream frosting. I hope you guys
enjoy today's super easy recipe and if you try this one out please let me know
what you think. I always love hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
(That's good icing)