I hate American Buttercream…so I invented a new frosting

I really want everyone to see this recipe, it's for a new American

buttercream

. Now I

invented

it because I

hate

traditional American

buttercream

, where you beat butter until light and fluffy, add a ton of powdered sugar, and then like milk. or cleaning to dilute it, the thing is we have to add so much sugar to the butter in that recipe that it affects the sweetness, it's super sweet and then it's very gritty. Now the recipe I'm going to show you today is much milder it's a little less sweet uses only a few ingredients comes together in minutes freezes well in pipes well bakers this is the complete package this one is good let me show you how I discovered it well here they are the main ingredients and quantities we would need for a traditional American buttercream and I have reduced a recipe so you can see the ratio of sugar per stick of butter, so we have butter, powdered sugar and water which can now be replaced with milk or cream. butter is about 20% water and is evenly dispersed within the butterfat, sugar dissolves in water, in fact it loves water, the term for this is hygroscopic, but there is an upper limit to the amount of sugar which can be dissolved in water, so let's try to dissolve this amount. of powdered sugar and about the amount of water in a stick of butter that I can stir and for the most part it seems moist although very thick and doughy.

Now imagine this sugar paste on a stick of butter, the sugar will not dissolve in the fat or the oil can only dissolve in water and if I indulge it it is crunchy, almost super gritty. I can try cornstarch, which is often added to powdered sugar so that it doesn't clump when we buy it because of the large amount of sugar. that we are adding to a buttercream, what you are looking at here is why these buttercreams are so gritty that the sugar just has nowhere to go, so what is the maximum amount of sugar that we can add to butter What will dissolve in the water contained? inside without it being gritty, there's actually a word for this called solubility and sugar or sucrose has a relatively high solubility and water depends on the temperature of the water, but at room temperature water weighs about one and a half times the weight of water. so notice that it is much less than the initial amount that I showed you, but this is what will dissolve when you try it, there is no gritty feeling and the scientific reason for this is that the water separates the sugar from each other, isolating them and evenly. dispersing them within the water and making the sugar molecules so small that they are almost imperceptible to the human tongue now that I know that butter can only dissolve about 25 of the powdered sugar that I was using in my regular American buttercream.

I have to add some other sweetener and what I'm looking for is a sugar that's already dissolved in something or a syrup, okay, so I'm going to go to the sugar section of my pantry and I have several sugars that are already dissolved in water. so we have honey, it's a warped bottle, we have molasses back there and maple syrup, which is fake. I love that stuff, but what I'm looking for is this, this is corn syrup, that's what I need. Oh, and a side note. Don't be surprised by this ingredient, it's not high fructose corn syrup, it's just glucose, probably a little maltose and water.

High fructose corn syrup and fructose in general are not problematic, it's the amount that Americans typically consume it in because food manufacturers tend to use a lot of it, so the key is really moderation with everything fine, so now that I have the right amount of powdered sugar to use in my buttercream without making it too gritty and a little bit of liquid sugar to increase the sweetness, let me. I show you how it all comes together. The first thing I'm going to do is beat the butter until it's light and fluffy. Here's the texture of my butter, but honestly, it doesn't matter.

I have made this with cold butter from the refrigerator. It's just going to take you longer to get to that texture and you need to move on to the next step and notice that I'm using the whisk attachment, it's much more efficient than the paddle attachment at pushing air into the butter or aerating everything. Those wires are great for aerating and emulsifying, which is what we'll do in the next step. Now look at the color and texture of these two butters. On the left we have beaten and on the right is the unbeaten whipped or aerated butter. softer, slightly plumper and paler in color, the air has slightly separated the yellow fat from the butter, making it appear whiter, you will want to wait until you see your butter look like this because that means it is the right temperature and texture to receive the corn syrup now continuing with the whisk attachment.

I'm going to add the corn syrup a little at a time and then mix now once all the corn syrup has been added let it beat on high speed for at least another minute scraping the bottom. If necessary to make sure everything is mixed, then we already add the corn syrup to the butter. Now what I want you to do is try it. This is to give you an idea of ​​how sweet you want this

frosting

to taste. Totally subjective, what might be too sweet for me might not be sweet enough for you, so this will determine how much powdered sugar you're going to add in the next step, so then go ahead and add the powdered sugar you you don't add I don't have to sift and as for the quantity in my recipe, I will give a little more than the maximum amount of sugar that can be dissolved considering all the water that will be available, there will still be a slight grain when we use this amount.

I discovered that we need that extra boost of sweetness to do it right. It won't be as smooth as, say, a Swiss meringue buttercream, but it's much less grainy and gritty than our traditional American buttercream you may be used to if you need a harder consistency or a sweeter flavor. flavor, you can definitely handle more, but know that the more you add, the grittier it will become and you may wonder why I even add powdered sugar. Why not use all corn syrup? Well, corn syrup is a liquid and it is also less sweet. The main sugar in corn syrup is glucose and it is less sweet than table sucrose or powdered sugar and the amount we would have to add to get a good sweet buttercream will probably exceed the emulsifying capabilities of the butter, but There is also another advantage: the syrup is liquid. so there is no need to dilute it to get the right consistency with more milk, cream or water.

You really only need these three ingredients: butter, corn syrup, and powdered sugar. Oh, and flavor if you want, so I add a pinch of salt and a little. of vanilla, you can also add a touch of purple gel food coloring to offset the orange and yellow tones, as I show here at the end. You can switch to the paddle attachment to smooth out the big air pockets, but I think you'll find it. the final buttercream is quite smooth. Another question you may have is if you can use another type of syrup. The answer is probably corn syrup just gives us a flavorless option than say honey, which by the way, I've tried is glorious and that version of this.

Buttercream will probably appear on Kiki's leader soon. A video of mine would not be complete without proper analysis. I mean, this tastes amazing, but how well does it work, so let's look at the pipes. This is what I call level one. try the

frosting

because it's not difficult to apply it to cupcakes, it's always a little discouraging when a recipe geek goes on and on about how good a frosting is but only shows me how to apply it to a cupcake, seriously, I've spent too many hours researching and testing frostings to know that the cupcakes are level one, very easy, there is no external pressure on the frosting, nothing to hold it just has to look pretty and this one does it, check that everything is ok, level two is smoothing the outside of a large cake and this is my 2.0 sprinkle recipe and I'm going to use three layers here and I'm going to use this new American buttercream to fill the crumb layer and the top layer, this cake is very soft without having to be picky to work with absolutely these things.

It's as easy to glaze as it is to make spreadable and smooth, and because of the corn syrup, it has very few air bubbles, so it's very easy to work with. I'm also testing how it accepts color, which I didn't anticipate any problems with. but as you can see here, I'm getting a beautiful pink color with a gel food coloring and my level three test, the last test is the most extreme, can the frosting hold the layers of the cake or resist pressure over time to For this test, I left my Decorated Cake at room temperature, out of direct sunlight for 24 hours.

I monitored the temperature and it ranged from 73 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit depending on the time of day, so there are three things I typically look at when judging stability. of the frosting, so I don't see any bulging, that's the first thing that means the frosting is able to withstand the pressure of a heavy cake. This is a pretty heavy cake. The other thing is the softness. Could you maintain that softness? texture for the sides, that's why I left the sides of the cake very simple so we could evaluate them properly and I think it looks pretty good and then the third thing is any kind of leakage or loss of definition from the piping and what I did . yesterday it's still pretty much intact, it's holding the sprinkles really well, I went ahead and took the traditional American buttercream, the one without corn syrup that I made yesterday, I also left it on the counter so I could do a comparison between the two, OK? give this a chance, okay, this is what happened overnight, because yesterday I tried this frosting.

The excess powdered sugar in this recipe has further dissolved into the liquid contained in the buttercream, so today's finished buttercream actually has about two percent of the grit from this. buttercream so I'm excited for you all to try this frosting. I'm going to go ahead and enter it into my calculator, it's where all my recipes are saved. Let me know if you love it, let me know if you

hate

it. From all this, the channel and the calculator should be useful and with the comments I can improve it for you and with that I will see you next time.