Choosing the Right Buttercream for Your Wedding Cup Cakes
<April 13, 2009 by admin
Filed under Wedding Cake Recipes
Choosing the right buttercream frosting recipe for your wedding cup cakes is crucial. You want it to taste great. You want it to look great. And if you’re going to make your own wedding cake (or wedding cup cakes), you want it to be easy to use.
Finding a buttercream recipe that tastes good is not difficult. After sampling a few recipes, you will realize what you like and what you don’t like. Some are made with all butter, some with shortening, and some with a mixture of both. Some are whipped until they’re light and fluffy and some are more dense.
Taste is a matter of preference – and that’s why I decided to try a new buttercream recipe. I found a recipe from “Kittencal” over at Recipezaar. The recipe received rave reviews. It claims to be “the best frosting”. How could I resist? And since I was anxious to try the CIA technique for making “cupcake bouquets” , I decided to give it a try.
The icing was really easy to mix and pulled together well. It has a great consistency in the bowl and was very easy to color/tint. I pulled some out to keep white (see pic above). I decided to go with yellow for the flowers.
And here’s what I got…. a floppy flower…
Lessons Learned:
- Not every buttercream recipe is great for cupcake decorating. I think the shortening in the mix made is too “limp”. The petals flopped instead of being perky as in the video.
- If an instructor from the CIA gives you a recipe – USE IT!
- Yellow food coloring quickly goes from pale yellow to bright yellow!
The recipe from “Kittencal” was great to spread but not great to pipe. It would be a nice recipe for wedding cupcakes if you do not intend to pipe any decorations. I will probably make it again in the future but will probably use it for a birthday cake or for some quick iced cupcakes.
The best buttercream, of course, is the Italian meringue buttercream. It’s the most stable, the egg whites are cooked thoroughly (no fear of sickness), and it’s really not that hard if you’re organized. Most people are afraid of boiling the sugar/water solution to soft ball stage and then drizzling it into the whipped egg whites. The trick is adding 2 tbs of light Kayro to the solution when bubbles begin to form and watch for the color to turn to translucent gold and the bubbles to get small, uniform and tight (they look really crowded). At this point, I dip my frozen finger (glass of ice water) into the boiling sugar solution and then dunk it into the ice water to test for soft ball stage; however, you can use a wooden chopstick instead of your finger and get the same results. The “ball” should stay soft but not fall apart when you roll it between your forefinger and your thumb. At this point, you can start drizzling the sugar solution SLOWLY into your whipped egg whites. You have to run your mixer until the bottom of the bowl is cool (10-15 minutes– no, you can’t rush it by putting a bowl of ice under the mixer bowl; only then can you add the soft butter in chunks (the final stage).
Let me know if you have any questions.
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