Before you read further, we wanted to ask you, how long do you beat your buttercream for? 1min? 2mins? 5mins? Forever??? 🙂 Do you put the ingredients together, leave it on the stand mixer, and while it is beating you go check what’s happening in facebook? or go start hoovering or tidying up? or feed the kids (both big and small) perhaps??? 🙂 You will understand in a while why we asked…so just read on..
Below are bowls of goodness 🙂 Both are the same luscious, melts-in-the-mouth, creamy buttercream (modified American buttercream). But let us look closer at these two so we can understand better what really is the difference.
First, left bowl is darker in colour and right bowl is obviously lighter. Let us bring out our magnifying lens and look even closer at the appearance.
This is from the left bowl. The slightly darker buttercream is spread with a palette knife and it gives you a smooth finish. Does this look like your buttercream?
… or does it look like this? Notice the holes as it was spread.
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Now let us go back to the question earlier: How long do you beat your buttercream for? If we will base the answer from these two bowls, LEFT bowl was beaten for less than 1 minute while RIGHT bowl was beaten for about 5mins (or even longer).
It is very typical that you hear (or see in recipes) people say that they beat their buttercream forever so it becomes “light and fluffly”. Yes, this is absolutely correct. The longer you beat, the more air you incorporate in your buttercream, thus, it will have lots of holes or air-pockets, it will also make the colour lighter. If you will use your buttercream primarily for filling or maybe as simple swirls, then this is ok.
But what if you are going to use your buttercream for flower piping?
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You wouldn’t want your pretty flowers to look like the one on the right, right??
Ok, granting that you have been on Facebook for far too long and you have overbeaten you buttercream. 🙂 Is there a fix? Of course! Besides that you can just use it as a filling rather than for covering, we did some experiments to try and revive the buttercream. Here’s what you can do:
Use the power of SPATULA! Yes, no other fancy tool but just use your good old spatula combined with your muscles! Knock the air-pockets out by running your spatula flat on the surface with back and forth motion. It is more like spreading motion rather than mixing motion, then fold, then repeat until smooth.
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And the other way is to let it chill in the fridge first until it solidifies again. And when you are ready to use it, thaw it first then just manually do the spreading motion again. It’s that easy! (well ok you need some muscles here) 🙂
The buttercream recipe we use is in all our BOOKS and we are now editing the video tutorial so stay tuned! Make sure to subscribe to our Mailing List (found on the right and bottom) and our youTube channel as well so you wouldn’t miss it.
We hope that this blog would help you in your buttercream making and please do share to help others. Let us know if there are any other topics you want us to discuss 🙂
