Reply to best birthday cake frosting recipe?

Forum Index » Food, Cooking, and Restaurants

Reply to "best birthday cake frosting recipe?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The posters who are disparaging salted butter are not experienced cooks/bakers, and are likely only parroting whatever they've heard from other people.

The other posters are right--butter (salted especially) AND shortening will give you the best possible frosting. You can also look up recipes and techniques for cooked buttercreams, such as German and Italian, but I personally like American buttercream the best.

I will also say that American butter really works best for frosting. [b]Euro style butter such as Plugra and Kerrygold are really too heavy to really give you that clean flavor you're going fo[/b]r, and it also gives your frosting an unpleasant yellow tinge.

In pastry class, we practiced with a lot with frosting made from hi ratio shortening and powdered sugar, and with the right kind of flavoring (emulsion flavorings), I liked it almost as much as buttercream made with butter.

It all depends on what taste you're going for. If you like supermarket cake, know that it is shortening based frosting and that's what you should go for when making yours.

Whipped frosting however, is an abomination and should be purged from the planet. [/quote]

Thanks.  THis is OP.  I used Kerrygold last time because I like it sooo much better than American butter for almost all purposes, but it was really not great for buttercream.  I think one person (a real butter addict) liked it that way, but my kids were like "Mom, it tastes too much like butter."   That recipe (from Cook's Illustrated) was one that started with a cooked base that had regular sugar instead of confectionary, so I thought it might have a better flavor...but the butterness overpowered everything.   There's probably some combination of Kerrygold and Crisco that would be ideal (mix of flavor plus stiffness), but I'm not going to run the in-home Test Kitchen necessary to find it.

Can you tell me what you mean by hi ratio shortening?  Is that Crisco?
[/quote]

Definitely try just a cheap box of American butter or cut back on the amount of Kerrygold when you combine with Crisco, that should give you the desired flavor and consistency you're going for.

Hi Ratio shortening is just a shortening with emulsifiers that professional and avid bakers use to make frosting more heat stable and just all around better than using Crisco. I find that it tastes better, less greasy, and you don't have to use as much of it to get the desired consistency. But it is a little more expensive and hard to find, and most home bakers simply don't bake enough to justify buying it. When I baked a ton, I bought it in bulk from a local cake decorating store. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics