When you see a frosting recipe and realize that most American buttercream frostings have only 5 or so ingredients, you think it’s going to be a pretty simple recipe. Which it is, in some ways. Getting the frosting to taste the way you want is fairly simple. But getting the frosting to the right consistency to frost smoothly on a cake or hold its shape when piped onto a cupcake is a much bigger challenge than you’d think. There are 3 key pieces to getting your frosting the exact consistency that you want:
- Beating the butter and/or shortening before adding any other ingredients
- Adding the right amounts of powdered sugar and liquid
- Beating the frosting once all the ingredients have been added
1. Beating the butter and/or shortening before adding any other ingredients
If you’ve used my Vanilla Buttercream Frosting recipe, you know that the first step is whipping the butter and shortening together for 8-10 minutes. This seems like the longest amount of time you’ve ever done anything. It feels absurd. BUT, it’s SO important to get smooth frosting, and I can prove it to you.
Here’s what my butter and shortening looked like after whipping them together for 1 minute:
Here’s what it looked like after whipping it for 5 minutes:
And here’s what it looked like after whipping it for 10 minutes:
Can you believe that difference?? It’s really incredible how the butter and shortening transform. They get lighter in color and by the end of the 10 minutes it almost looks like a frosting consistency all on its own! It does NOT taste like it though so I wouldn’t recommend sneaking a spoonful…but here are some side-by-side spoonfuls just for comparison’s sake!
Having this base of perfectly smooth and fluffy butter and shortening sets you up to have a perfectly smooth frosting once you’re done.
2. Adding the right amounts of powdered sugar and liquid
Most buttercream frosting recipes call for an amount of powdered sugar and then give a range of how much milk or cream to use instead of giving an exact amount. Some recipes give a range both of powdered sugar and of milk. It can be frustrating! Especially if you’re just getting started with baking it feels much more challenging when you’re not given exact amounts of ingredients. But the consistency of your frosting and how much of each ingredient you need is so dependent on things like how long you’ve whipped your butter (which we will all do for 8-10 minutes now that we’ve read #1!!), what the weather is like that day, how humid your kitchen is, and so many more seemingly unrelated things. Even making frosting with the same ingredients in my same mixer in my same kitchen requires a different amount of milk to be added every time. So it’s much more important to judge the consistency of your frosting by sight than it is to use an exact amount of ingredients.
In my Vanilla Buttercream Frosting recipe one of the last steps is sticking a clean finger into the bowl of frosting to test the consistency. You can tell what your frosting needs more of based on how much frosting sticks to your finger.
If your finger comes out looking like this, you need more milk or cream:
If the frosting isn’t covering your whole fingertip with ease, it’s going to be too thick to spread easily on a cake or cupcakes. (To make life more difficult, there are times when you may be going for this consistency like if you’re trying to do really intricate decorations that need to maintain their shape, but that’s another discussion for another time.)
If your finger comes out looking like this, you need to add more powdered sugar:
You want the frosting to cover your whole fingertip, yes, but see how this one almost looks soupy? If it’s not holding it’s shape even a little bit on your finger than it’s not going to hold it’s shape on a cupcake.
What you’re hoping to see when you lift your finger out of the bowl is this:
A finger that’s fully covered with frosting but still has some peaks lifting up and holding their shape. It can take a while to get a feel for these consistencies, so don’t worry too much if you don’t get it right away. The great thing about frosting is you can always add more milk or powdered sugar later on if you start decorating and realize it’s the consistency you wanted.
3. Beat the frosting once all the ingredients have been added
I know you spent 10 whole minutes beating your butter so beating everything again seems even more unnecessary. But as you added powdered sugar and mixed everything really slowly so that you didn’t get powdered sugar all over your entire kitchen, you incorporated air into your frosting. By beating it for another 3 or 4 minutes at the end, you can get all the air bubbles out of your final frosting and make sure it goes on to your dessert very smoothly.
These 3 tips make it take a little longer to actually make the frosting, but it’ll save you a ton of time later when you’re trying to smooth your frosting on a cake or get your cupcakes to look perfect!