How to Make Swiss Meringue Buttercream (SMBC)

Hi everyone, I'm Liz Merrick with the Sugar Geek show and today we're going to talk about how to

make

Swiss Meringue Buttercream, the best

buttercream

ever. Swiss Meringue Buttercream is a lot like Easy Buttercream, in fact my Easy Buttercream is adapted from Swiss Meringue Buttercream. I used to

make

Swiss Meringue Buttercream every time I had to make a wedding cake and while it's really good, it's time consuming, so if you're looking for a shortcut to Swiss Meringue Buttercream, check out my easy

buttercream

recipe so that The easy buttercream recipe uses something called pasteurized egg whites, which is this type here, this is what I use to make easy buttercream, but if you're going to make buttercream With old-fashioned Swiss

meringue

, you will have to use egg whites from one egg and these are not pasteurized, so the difference between easy buttercream and Swiss

meringue

buttercream is basically the egg whites, so Let's go ahead and start making our Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

I've got all my ingredients out, I've got a couple inches of water poured into a like. a saucepan and I'm going to bring it to a simmer, this is called a double boiler or French double boiler. Here I have a stainless steel mixing bowl that I am going to prepare my meringue in. You want to make sure that your stainless steel bowl is super clean, free of grease or oil or anything, especially if you've made buttercream in it, because any small amount of grease can cause the meringue to not whip up. Some people ask if you can use a glass bowl to do this and you can, but the meringue will take much longer to cool.

I have my butter here. This is soft butter. You should be able to put your fingerprint on the soft butter and you should be able to make a mark, but the butter basically still holds its shape, that's perfect, you crack the egg on the counter and then we're going to crack the egg into a bowl and then I'll put it away. my yolks to use later, make sure there are no stray egg yolks. pieces there and then you can transfer that to your main bowl, so if you get some stray egg yolk in there, you'll see that my egg yolk broke while I was breaking it into this bowl, so I can't use that egg at all, so this water should just be simmering, it doesn't need to be very hot and make sure the container is not in the water because then it could cook the egg whites and we don't want scrambled eggs so I'm going to Place my egg whites here and then my sugar and then I'll give it a quick little shake.

Basically, we're going to whisk this every 30 seconds or so to make sure the liquids are heated evenly. We're not trying to beat it, just moving it around and if you dip your finger in here and feel it, you can feel the grains of sugar in the egg white, so we want to keep beating this and let it warm up until you can. I no longer feel those grains of sugar or if you want to use a thermometer when the mixture reaches 110 degrees Fahrenheit, it's hot enough. I also try to spoon the mixture onto the sides of the bowl to make sure I'm getting some. kind of lost sugar granules, I want all of that to almost melt there, the mixture is also pretty warm, so don't be surprised when you stick your finger in there, it's a little warm, you'll notice the liquids starting to get more or less too it becomes looser as it gets closer to the right stage, it will look less like a very thick egg white and will start to feel more a little watery and that's because the sugar is dissolving.

Well, I can't feel any green part of the sugar there. It feels nice and smooth, so I'm going to go ahead and take it off the heat, so now we're going to put this in our stand mixer. You can do this by hand with a hand mixer, it's definitely possible, so it's going to take longer and a little more effort, so now we're going to beat this until we get firm peaks, which means our meringue will stick straight up when be ready. Okay, it's been three minutes and I just want to do a little check. the sides you see, the meringue is falling off, that's not stiff enough, but that's okay, it's probably been about five or six minutes and it could probably still go a little bit longer.

The tips of those meringues are still falling off although it's getting stiffer, yes. a little bit longer okay I can tell it's definitely nice and stiff you can see it's standing up obviously if your little tendrils are too long they won't stand up but that's definitely what you're looking for so now before begin. To make our buttercream, we have to let this meringue cool. If you feel like the bottom of the bowl is probably still pretty hot, if you add buttercream to it, it will melt into a thick batter, so what I do is I scoop out all my meringue and put it in a cake pan or in a plate or something to spread it out, you know, so it's not so compact and then I'll put it in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes and then it will cool down super fast, okay, so my meringue is nice and cold, I touched it and that's it.

It doesn't feel hot, let me put it back in the bowl, it's a little sticky, beat again, okay, now we have our softened butter. I'm going to start adding it in small pieces, I just use my fingers, this is creaming all the butter into the meringue and it makes it nice and fluffy, it's going to taste amazing, so you can go ahead and add the vanilla and don't forget. your salt, since we used unsalted butter, your buttercream will not be too salty, but you still need a little to cut that sweetness and intensify the flavor when the buttercream is ready, it should look very silky, not yellow, and if you give it flavor. it should taste like cream and not butter, if it tastes like butter you should beat it more just to give it a little flavor, oh my goodness it's so good it never goes out of style so almost all butter has a yellowish tint to it. and that's just for the butter, sometimes you'll notice that like lower quality butters they will be even more yellow and that's because in the past high quality butter was considered to be of better quality the more yellow it is. was, this is not necessarily the case anymore, so some companies still put yellow food coloring in their butter to make it more yellow and so annoying, so to counteract that and get rid of the air bubbles, I'm going to change to the paddle attachment and I'm going to put a couple drops of purple food coloring in my buttercream and this violet or purple or whatever you have is going to counteract the yellow that's in the buttercream and make it look whiter, like this which I'm going to go ahead and let my buttercream mix for about 10 minutes on low, the buttercream is ready, you can use it right now, but what it does is it just removes all the bubbles from the buttercream, so which is super smooth, a totally extra step, but I do it, now our buttercream is very smooth.

It doesn't have a lot of bubbles, you can keep mixing this until it's completely bubble-free, but I'm going to go ahead and say it's good, it's enough buttercream to frost an eight-inch round cake inside and out and uh, it The best thing about Swiss meringue buttercream is that it is completely stable. You can leave it at room temperature for two days if you really need to and if you need to store it, you can put the leftovers in the refrigerator for a week or you can freeze it for up to six months it's great for placing under fondant it's stable enough to make rosettes or you know, cupcakes, whatever you need to do with it, you can flavor it with curd extracts it's amazing, seriously, it's the best buttercream ever, so that's all there is to know How to make buttercream

swiss

navy I hope this was a great tutorial for you and you learned a lot about how to make Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

I'm Liz Merrick and I'll see you next time, bye.