This guidance works best for American style buttercream frosting. Below are some solutions to prevent or fix common buttercream issues.
Reasons why your buttercream is splitting, curdling or losing shape:
1. Your butter is too warm
If so, just pop your mixture in the fridge or freezer for a while. A warm kitchen can also affect the temperature of your buttercream.
2. Over-mixing
This makes the butter warmer resulting in splitting. Try mixing and refrigerating in stages.
3. Too much liquid
Try not to add liquids to the buttercream so soon, and when you do add liquid, only use small amounts. I believe this is one of the main culprits that cause splitting – especially when adding colour.
4. Low-fat content butter
While fat content does not necessarily cause splitting or curdling, it can cause your buttercream to lose its shape - which is not ideal for piping. When it comes to baking, use ingredients with high fat content.
What's the solution?
Firstly, mix your butter alone until it becomes lighter in colour - almost white.
Then add in your sifted icing sugar a little at a time until all incorporated. Keep doing this until your mix resembles scrambled eggs and becomes dry, but smooth enough to mix.
Continue adding as much sugar as your ingredients state until it's stiff.
Next, add your food colouring and flavouring extracts and mix.
At this stage, add about 1/2 teaspoon to 1 teaspoon of milk. N.B. you don’t always need to add milk to your buttercream. Sometimes your flavouring extracts and colouring is enough.
Keep mixing until you have your desired consistency. I prefer mine stiff. You can continue to add icing sugar if necessary to firm up your buttercream.
Tips:
If your American buttercream is too sweet, you can cut the sweetness by carefully adding some cream cheese to the mixture. Avoid using salt, as this will create white spots on your frosting and cause colour splitting.
If you are making a vanilla frosting and it splits, set it aside and create an additional new batch of buttercream (with no liquids). Then slowly incorporate it into the original buttercream in stages.
Unfortunately, if you have already added food colouring to your mix and it has curdled, you may have to throw it out and start again. However, you can work around this if you intend to cover your cupcakes with fondant. It shouldn't affect the overall taste.
Using a cream cheese buttercream?
It's important to note that you may experience issues with cream cheese frosting. I found that a runny cream cheese frosting is caused by the naturally occurring high water content in most supermarket cream cheeses. If you combine that with a low-fat option, you're in trouble!
Ways to avoid a runny cream cheese frosting:
Always use 100% full fat cream cheese.
Add your cream cheese at the very last stage when making your frosting.
Keep your cream cheese chilled.
Consider draining the water out of the cream cheese block before adding it to your frosting bowl.
Consider adjusting the ratios of your American buttercream frosting with cream cheese. I like to use a 60/40 ratio for some recipes to ensure my frosting is stiff enough for star tip piping.
Don't bother adding any additional liquid to your buttercream frosting batch (aside from any flavouring or colouring).
Following these tips will ensure you have the perfect buttercream every time!
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