Buttercream frosting can be nirvana. You need a great recipe and lots of butter. That butter consumption explains my second picture there. The top picture is our Easter Devil’s Food Cake [no pun intended] that I posted yesterday. The cake is wonderful. It deserves a superior frosting.
I have obsessions. Buttercream is one of them. I collect recipes and I love to compare the results. Here are the ingredients for three buttercream variations from
- The Sprinkles Baking Book by Candace Nelson
- Butter Baked Goods by Rosie Daykin
- The Vanilla Bean Baking Book by Sarah Kiffer
| Ingredient | Sprinkles | Butter | Vanilla Bean |
| Yield | 2 cups | 2 cups | 2 cups |
| Butter | 1 cup | 1 cup | 1 cup |
| Powdered Sugar | 3 cups | 2 cups | 1 ½ cups |
| Vanilla | 1 teaspoon | 2 tablespoons | 1 teaspoon |
| Salt | ⅛ teaspoon | ⅛ teaspoon | |
| Milk | 5 teaspoons | ¼ cup |
All three recipes here been written to give the same yield of two cups. For a batch of cupcakes, this amount will work. For a two-layer cake, you’ll want to double it.
I tested two of these for Easter: Sprinkles and Vanilla Bean. I will test Butter soon — I only had one cake and I had my reasons.
The Butter recipe looks very different, much less dry to liquid ingredients. It has that high amount of vanilla plus the milk and I’m sure that it will much less thick when frosting.
The Sprinkles and Vanilla Bean recipes let us compare one key factor: the influence of milk. [That’s why I needed to defer Butter: too many variables at once]. Because the Sprinkles recipe has 5 teaspoons of milk, she calls for twice the amount of powdered sugar you see in the Vanilla Bean recipe. Twice the sugar. The Vanilla Bean recipe has no milk, so it is truly much stiffer in your mixer when you first combine butter and sugar.
How does this even out to get a spreadable frosting? The Sprinkles recipe calls for a final mixing of all ingredients for just 1-2 minutes with a caution not to overbeat, not to incorporate too much air. In contrast, the Vanilla Bean recipe calls for 6-8 minutes of final beating to achieve a light, fluffy texture. Totally different techniques. Air not wanted, air wanted.
And the result? I had one of Suzi’s professional bakers frost our cake and sample the frostings. Like me, he loves them both but thinks the Vanilla Bean recipe is a touch sweeter and little easier to spread — which is really a matter of temperature too if you refrigerate the frosting before spreading. It really is a matter of personal preference. Tastewise, they are very, very similar. Personally, I’ll eat either one.
I’m now very curious to try the Butter recipe with that heavy input of vanilla and milk. I need a cake and that will not be happening until early May. In the meantime, I’m sure these two recipes from Sprinkles and Vanilla Bean will work just fine for you. Just perfectly fine.
You’ll find reviews of the Sprinkles and Butter books here on this blog. Vanilla bean will appear soon!