08 March 2010

Buttercream Icing recipe and Coloring tips!!

SO I know that I have given you some good cake recipes, but its time to give you some icing recipes!!!  I almost always use buttercream icing for cakes, it has a great consistency and tastes great.  The buttercream recipe is from Wilton, and it is the recipe given in a Wilton Course 1 decorating class.  But, first I'm going to give some decorating tips!!!
Color your icing!!! Coloring your icing allows you to ice your cake in a beautiful color if you don't know how to or don't want to decorate your cake!  To color buttercream icing you CAN NOT use food coloring drops that you find at a grocery store, they make the icing wayyy to thin and can even give it a bad taste.  You need to buy concentrated icing coloring, which you can get at a cake decorating store or Hobby Lobby.

They look like the bottles in the picture above.  To color your icing, take a clean toothpick, place it in the color and stir it around to get a big dollop on the toothpick.  Then place the toothpick in the icing and stir to get the coloring off, throw toothpick away.  Mix the icing well, and set bowl aside.  The color of the icing will darken in a few mins, then, if needed, add more coloring to achieve desired color.

Buttercream Icing recipe:


Ingredients:
1cup white vegetable shortening (crisco)
1 tsp colorless vanilla extract
2 T milk or water
1 lb pure cane confectioners' sugar
1 T Wilton meringue powder
A pinch of salt

Directions:
1.  Cream shortening, flavoring, and water together in your Kitchen Aid mixer (a hand held mixer isn't good enough for this recipe).  Add dry ingredients and mix on medium speed until all ingredients and throughly mixed together.  Blend a couple more mins, until creamy.

2.  This makes a very, very stiff consistency icing.  If you are using this batch to ice your cake, add a couple more tablespoons of water, one at a time, until it thins out some.  If you are using this batch for decorating, it needs to be stiff, so just add ~2T more water to it.

Tips:
1.  In order to get a white icing, and not an off colored yucky yellow one, you must use colorless vanilla extract which you can sometimes find at publix but is always at Hobby Lobby.
2.  The confectioners sugar must be exactly accurate or this won't work.  Publix sells 1 lb bags and 2 lb bags already pre-weighted, so use those.
3.  I have never seen the meringue powder at a grocery store, you need to go to a cake supply store or Hobby Lobby to buy it.
4.  This recipe makes ~3 cups of icing, which is enough to ice the cake.  You will have to make a 2nd batch if you also want to decorate the cake.
5.  A hand held mixer will not work for this recipe, it just isn't strong enough to make it correctly... sorry!

Chocolate Buttercream Icing:
1.  To the buttercream recipe above, add 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa and add an additional 1-2 T water to recipe.  Mix until well blended.

Tomorrow I will give instructions on how to ice a cake!!

Happy Baking!

1 comment:

  1. i take the wilton course 1 class....and i only have a hand held mixer but it worked fine......nice tips ....
    -sarah

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