As butter is one of the key ingredients of buttercream (the clue is in the name!), it’s very common for buttercream or butter icing to be a pale shade of yellow. Most of the time, this is absolutely fine! However, if you want to colour your buttercream or you need it to be white for a specific design, follow the steps below! I have found this is the best way to get white buttercream, perfect for your cakes and bakes.
I recently used this method for the filling in my Creme Egg Cake.
Cut your butter into cubes and pop it in your mixer bowl. Then beat it on a high speed for about 4-5 minutes. This will aerate the butter and create a paler colour.
Next, add in your icing sugar and make your buttercream as usual. I use 250g butter to 500g icing sugar.
Here’s where we get clever. To neutralise the natural yellow colouring in the buttercream, add a TINY amount of purple. For best results, you need to use a concentrated food colouring, I’m using Sugarflair Grape Violet. I need to emphasise how small an amount you need, what you can see on the cocktail stick in the above picture is about right for the amount of buttercream I had but I would start off with an even smaller amount. The key is to add just enough to see the yellow start to turn white, we don’t want purple buttercream.
And there you have it! White buttercream. Perfect for colouring or enjoying in all it’s pure glory!
Alternatively, if you’re interested in how to make black buttercream, check out my blog here.
Give it a try and let me know how you get on either on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Happy Baking!
Britt xo
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