Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make the best lemon frosting.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here!
And today I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well-researched,
and perfected recipe. For such a simple recipe,
today's frosting took a lot of attempts to get just right.
I wanted a rich, deep lemon flavor and I found
I couldn't quite accomplish that by just adding a little bit of
lemon juice to a typical buttercream frosting, like
so many recipes do. So instead,
we are going to be beginning this frosting by building it on a simple lemon curd base. Now
because we're making a lemon curd—and it is a very easy one,
trust me—we're going to need a small saucepan.
We're going to start with just 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar,
add 1/4 teaspoon of salt. We're also going to be adding two large egg yolks
and these are just the egg yolks.
Now don't worry about the eggs, we are going to be cooking them before we consume them
so you're not going to be eating raw eggs.
You'll also need 1/3 cup of lemon juice for today's recipe.
I prefer fresh lemon juice. You can use bottled if that's all you have.
I’m just going to squeeze my lemons. That’s actually
not how you squeeze a lemon half,
I did that wrong. I'm a little sleep deprived today.
You want to flip it around and then squeeze it.
That's how you get the most juice out of it.
Now we'll add the lemon juice in with our other ingredients.
We're just going to whisk everything together until it's well combined.
All right, now we're also going to need 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter.
And I like to cut this into four pieces before I add it in with my other ingredients,
and we’ll take this over to our stove top. Now we’ll cook this over medium-low heat until it begins to thicken.
Now, while this is beginning to cook, I want to make sure that I have what I need for my next
step ready. You're going to need a heatproof bowl and a fine
mesh strainer so that we can pour the curd through that once we're finished.
Now you don't want to turn the heat up too high, or else you can end up
accidentally cooking the eggs and ruin your curd,
so just keep it on medium-low,
and just continue to whisk until your whisk starts to leave trails in the mixture.
All right, now this is looking pretty good. Yours may bubble a little bit like mine is, that's fine
if it does. I like to use the back of a spoon test as well.
So, I'll just dip my spoon in there. You can see the mixture is coating
the back of the spoon. If I use my finger to draw a line, that line holds
its shape. So this is looking pretty good,
so I'm going to remove it from the heat and I'm going to pour it through my strainer.
Any bits that you catch, you can just go ahead and discard. Now the lemon curd
may seem a little thin at this point.
What we're going to do is we're going to let it cool completely before we use it in our frosting.
I do want to prevent it from forming a skin on the surface,
so I'm just going to take a piece of wax paper and press that over the surface of the curd.
Now I like to pop this in the fridge to just speed up the cooling process.
All right, now once your lemon curd is completely cooled,
we can go ahead and prep our frosting. We're going to combine two sticks of softened,
unsalted butter in a large mixing bowl.
And then we’re just going to use an electric mixer to cream the butter until it is light and fluffy.
Alright, now for today's recipe, you will need 3 cups of powdered sugar.
We are just going to gradually add that into our butter mixture.
And the mixture will start to seem dry,
just make sure you go slowly and just make sure you get all of that sugar incorporated.
Try not to add too much sugar at once, or it'll make it really difficult to combine everything.
Okay, this Is looking pretty good, so let's grab our lemon curd.
And I do want to scrape whatever I can off of that wax paper, don’t want to lose any of that
flavor and we’ll pour that lemon curd in there.
All right, now we'll just beat everything together until it's smooth and well combined.
And of course you want to scrape the bowl, that way you're ensuring
you're getting that lemon flavor in every bit of that frosting.
And that's really all there is to making this super simple frosting.
You can use it to cover a cake, I want to go ahead
and put it in a piping bag
so I can show you how beautifully it pipes on cupcakes and how great it is for piping.
I’m just using my Ateco 848 tip here,
and I want you to see how nicely it pipes. And this frosting holds its shape very well.
If you wanted it to be even stiffer, you could add another cup of powdered sugar,
but I've never really found that to be necessary.
And that is how easy it is to make this ridiculously tasty lemon frosting.
I really hope you guys love this recipe, and if you try it out,
please leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
I always love hearing from you. Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
This is so good.