I love using buttercream on my cakes and cupcakes but do you ever find it a little yellow for what you need? In the UK our butter is quite yellow so you are always going to get a yellowy/ ivory buttercream, but in this weeks video tutorial I’m going to show you a few tricks and things you can add to make it alot whiter.
This is great maybe if you are creating buttercream cakes for weddings or even as a base for colouring your buttercream other colours.
The Recipe
To make my buttercream I’m still using my American buttercream recipe. You can find a tutorial with some more helpful tips, including what butter I use to make it here: https://youtu.be/tJ_T9WJEgXg
12oz / 340g – Icing Sugar
6oz/ 170g – Room Temperature Salted Butter
1.5 tbsp – Milk
1 tbsp – Vanilla Favouring (or favouring of your choice)
This usually makes enough to pipe 12 cupcakes!
Turning your buttercream white
So the big question is how do you get your yellow buttercream to turn white. The truth is it takes a few stages. The first stage is to whiten your butter. Now you can do this with all your ingredients added to the bowl. In the tutorial I do it before I add my sugar just so you can see the different. By beating butter for longer it naturally starts to lighten. You can see below by beating the butter for 15 minutes you get a much lighter yellow to our original buttercream.
We then want to remove some of those yellow tones. To do this I add really small amounts of purple food gel. In the colour wheel purple is directly opposite yellow so it can be used to cancel out yellow tones. Have you ever seen in the supermarket purple shampoos for blonde people. The purple shampoo cancels out the brassy tones, and the same thing is happening here.
This gives us an off white buttercream, so the last stage is to add a whitener. There are different whiteners on the market and these come in either a powder or a liquid. I used the new ‘Icing & frosting whitener’ by Ingenious Edibles. You can add as much as you like. In the tutorial I added 1 tablespoon just to show you how much it can be whitened.
TOP TIP: If you add alot of whitener and it makes your buttercream a little soft you can add in a few more table spoons of icing sugar to get it back to the consistency you want for your buttercream.
Using this as a base for other colours
Normal yellow buttercream can cause problems when colouring your buttercream. One big example of this is if you are trying to get pastel shades, especially blue. If we think about mixing colours if you mix blue and yellow you get green! This can mean sometimes if you are colouring your buttercream a light blue colour we end up with a light green. By lightening your buttercream first it allows you to get much truer colours.
I really hope you will find this tutorial useful if you’re looking for a more whiter buttercream. Plus if you haven’t already you can subscribe to my YouTube channel for more Free cake decorating video tutorials.
Tools I used
I have put a list below showing all the tools that I used throughout this video or if you would like to see all my favourite cake decorating tools just click here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/cakesbylynz
Ingenious Edibles Whitener: https://prf.hn/l/7EvVxdV
Violet Colour Splash: https://amzn.to/30fm7ZF
AEG Stand Mixer (blue version): https://amzn.to/2TY6IJa
Piping bags I use: http://amzn.to/2xqeDlM
1M piping tip: https://amzn.to/32fXL2m
Sugarflair Super white Powder: https://amzn.to/32fPbkm
~ Please note that some of links above may be affiliate links. If you click the link and purchase any item through that link, I will receive a small commission from the website but this does NOT add any additional costs to you. Thank you so much for supporting this blog x ~
White American Buttercream Recipe
Ingredients
- 340 g Icing Sugar (12oz)
- 170 g Room Temperature Salted Butter (6oz)
- 1.5 tbsp Milk
- 1 tbsp Vanilla Favouring or favouring of your choice (preferably clear)
- Purple Food Gel
- Edible Food Whitener
Instructions
- Into a mixing bowl sift in the plain flour. Add the bicarbonate of soda, the ground cinnamon and the ground ginger and pop to one side.
- Into a saucepan add the butter, caster sugar, the brown sugar and the golden syrup and place this onto your hob until all the ingredients have melted together.
- You then want to add your melted ingredients to your dry ingredients in your mixing bowl. Using a wooden spoon or spatula mix this all together until it forms a dough. You can finish this off mixing it with your hands to make sure the ingredients are all combined.
- Take a piece of cling film / plastic wrap and push down your dough, coving it over. Place this into the fridge for 30 minutes.
- Whilst your dough is in the fridge you will need to print off and cut out your template pieces. You can find my template here.
- After 30 minutes take your dough out of the fridge. You can then dust your surface with a little flour and roll out your dough until its around 5mm in thickness. Then use a knife to cut out all of your shapes and place on a baking tray.
- Place your cut out shapes into a preheated oven set to 180 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes. You want the edges just to start changing colour.
- After 10 minutes you can take your shapes out of the oven to let them cool. I like to use my templates and carefully (they will be hot) cut around the template a second time, to cut off any areas that have spread in size. This will help your house fit together a little easier.
- You then have all the pieces for your gingerbread house. I like to use royal icing to stick my pieces together. Watch how to decorate your Gingerbread house in my tutorial above.
Plus why not save this tutorial for later and pin it to Pinterest
