You've put in all of this hard work into baking a three-layer cake: measuring and weighing ingredients, sifting, keeping an eye on the oven, even flipping each layer onto a cooling rack without cracking them. But then you go to frost your cake and disaster strikes. Your buttercream isn't holding up, and the layers are sliding everywhere. Or worse, it has little lumps of butter in it, and with every stroke of your offset spatula, crumbs get mixed into your buttercream. You can lie to yourself and say you were going for the "speckled" look, but we all know you weren't.
This doesn't have to be your story. Here are the three keys to the perfect buttercream every single time.
Be Patient With Your Butter, No Matter How Much You Hate Waiting.
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This shouldn't come as any surprise, but butter is the most important ingredient in this recipe — and its consistency is everything. As annoying as it is to leave butter out a while beforehand to let it soften, you can't skip this step. Cold butter won't mix properly, creating a gritty, blobby frosting.
If you think, "it's okay, I'll just pop it into the microwave for a few seconds," STOP. DON'T DO IT. Put the butter down, Carol. Butter that's too warm prevents the ingredients from mixing properly, causing the fat from the butter to leak and sit on top, giving your frosting that greasy, glistening look.
Try The Tablespoon Trick To Get Your Consistency Just Riiiight.
Once you've mixed in the softened butter and powdered sugar, combining them until perfectly smooth, you're ready for the second challenge: the heavy cream. Adding it one tablespoon at a time can seem annoying and tedious, but adding too much will cause your buttercream to be too thin and runny. You can thicken it by adding more powdered sugar, but then you run the risk of it getting too sweet.
When adding cream, it's helpful to know how you plan on using your frosting. Our Perfect Buttercream starts with adding just three tablespoons of heavy cream, which is ideal for frosting cupcakes freehand. When I need to use a tip to pipe flowers or something more intricate, I add an extra tablespoon so that it glides out of the tip easily but still holds it shape nicely.
Get Salty.
Buttercream can become so sweet, and just a small pinch of salt can keep it from getting cloyingly so. It will draw out the flavors you've added in, like vanilla or chocolate. A pinch of salt will make your buttercream stand out from those sugary, grocery-store sweets. I'm not telling you to make it salty — less than 1/4 teaspoon will suffice — but it'll make a huge difference in the overall flavor.
Put these tips the test and try out our Best Vanilla or Chocolate Buttercream.
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Makinze is currently senior food editor at Delish, where she develops recipes, creates, and hosts recipe videos and is our current baking queen. She is our expert pie crimper, believes you should always have the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies on hand, and everyone needs to know a perfect roast chicken recipe.
