Waitting for JYMum recipe, you can go to study...

It is not depend on recipe, it depend on the how you make buttercream

It is my own recipe, you can you any recipe with your knowledge about Butter ^^

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It is butter with yogurt, still glossy and skinny ^^

Hi, the flowers are really pretty. Do you mind sharing the buttercream recipe to archive the glossy and translucent effect? Thank you 

It is not Korean Buttercream, it is Loyoca Kitchen's Buttercream ^^

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Lovely!!! so it is not a buttercream recipe!

Do you mind sharing this recipe with the group

Thank you 

@Loyocakitchen ‍ yes would love your recipe!!! your flowers look gorgeous!! please email 

[email protected] 

Hello everybody, sorry but the recipe will be commercial, I am thinking about how to making the tutorial videos

It will be available soon

Thank you for reading ^^

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Please update us here when your tutorial is available!! Thank you 

I've registered to this forum especially for this topic of the elusive and mysterious Korean glossy, transluscent buttercream. This is going to be a long post. Please forgive/ignore my mistake-studded English, I'm French and I learned English in school so it's not perfect.

Right away I must precise I didn't make any trial or tests yet, as I recieved my order of appropriate piping tips for flowers yesterday (I'm not a pastry pro, I'm what you could call an "advanced enthusiast" so I don't keep a large supply stock). Also, there's a boiling water advisory where I live, so it's not a good idea to cook much until the advisory is lifted (probably sometime this week-end). I can't bring myself to boil any more water to wash dishes than what is already a truckload I boil for regular meals dishes.

I thought I'd post my findings here anyway and maybe someone will have the opportunity to test different theories before I get a chance to do it. So here we go.

When I started looking for clues, it was obvious from the start that the buttercream used by the Korean cake shops and ateliers showing off those gorgeous flowers is IMBC. So when I write "buttercream" in this post, I mean IMBC.

Glossy look

While researching the Korean glossy buttercream, I stumbled upon a Korean cake shop's detailed advice to clients on how to serve their gorgeous flower cakes. They advised to remove the cake from the refrigerator 20 to 30 minutes in advance and indicated that the longer the cakes sits at room temperature, the glossier the decorations become. The flowers look matte when just out of the fridge and become glossy and then shiny as they sit at room temp.

I'm sorry I don't have a link for this. I had gazillions of open tabs on my browser between Korean pages and their google-translate versions, sometimes quite late in the evening. I didn't do a good job weeding and keeping and curating before shutting down my computer and going to bed.

I spent some time comparing close shots of flowers featured in the best Instagram Korean baking shops for degrees of "glossiness" and shine. And yes, in a same shop, flowers looks range from matte to, sometimes, borderline oily-loking. I assumed it had to do with the timing of the photograph. FWIW, in "classes" shots, where it's pictures of their students work, is where the flowers look the most shiny/oily. I assume taking pictures at the end of a busy class doesn't allow much time for proping and preparing for the best outcome.

Waxy texture

The texture and appearance of the Korean buttercream isglossy and somewhat transluscent. It looks like soya wax as opposed to the fluffy, slightly textured "plaster" like western buttercream. The latter, when photographed from up close, displays tiny holes which are evidently left by bursting the largest bubbles when piped. The western Buttercream has air trapped in it (fluffiness) while the Korean buttercream is smooth, not airy (wax-like).

I admit I obsessed on possible reasons why the IMBC would look this way once piped into flowers. I got to fall asleep brainstorming different hypothesis lending to that result.

Since there is no "fluff" in the Korean buttercream, I thought maybe they beat it much longer than western bakers do, hence bursting all the macro and micro bubbles. Or maybe they use corn syrup, or maybe there's a "secret ingredient" in play...

Korean and Western IMBC Recipes Comparison

Short of having the recipe and procedure to obtain the beautiful, glossy, thin-petaled, smooth Korean buttercream flowers, I decided to look into both Korean and Western IMBC recipes to check for differences.

It wasn't easy to compare. Unlike French baking recipes, most were in volume, sometime butter by weight and all other ingredients in volume. I had to work on bringing all recipes in weight, by grams. Then to compare accurately, I decomposed the recipes in percentages.

An egg white weights an average of 35 grams. I chose this average value for egg whites.

I considered only the base ingredients (egg whites, sugar, butter) and discarded the secondary ingredients (water to moisten the sugar, vanilla).

I calculated 6 recipes in percentages. 3 Korean IMBC recipes and 3 American IMBC recipes from baking blogs whose owners seemed to be excellent at their craft. Suprisingly, all 3 Koreans displayed the same ratios of ingredients, more or less a few percentage points as did all 3 Western IMBCs.

I calculated the average percentage for the 3 Korean IMBC recipes then did the same for the Western IMBC recipes. Here are the results rounded to the appropriate upper or lower round number, for simplicity's sake.

Korean IMBC average ingredients ratios
Egg whites 20%
Sugar 22%
Butter 58%

Western IMBC average ingredients ratios
Egg whites 16%
Sugar 35%
Butter 49%

So as you can see, the first thing that stands out is Korean buttercreams recipes consistently showed a much higher ratio of (glossy, shiny) butter. Makes sense when you think about it. Makes even more sense if you consider my remark above, about the Korean baking shop describing to clients how the longer the cakes sits at room temp, the glossier the flowers, just like what happens when you leave butter out at room temp.

I consider this finding a small "Eureka". But it wasn't sufficient in my opinion to solve the mystery of the Korean buttercream flowers. Lots of Korean bakeries show buttercream flowers that lack the transluscent, glossy, almost waxy look we're after. Those who do boast of a "special recipe" or even "patented" recipe. We know we can't patent a recipe as in a list of ingredients but we can patent a procedure, a technique (as far as I know, I'm not a patent lawyer).

It's also worth noting one can always apply for a patent and boast of it in showing the Patent application form. It doesn't mean the patent was granted. It just means one has applied.

So next I spent some evening googling and some pre-falling-asleep time hypotesising (hope that's a word) about what technique would give the results we're after.

Techniques and Procedures Research

I used the term "research" in the title because until I actually try and test the techniques I suspect will lend to the beautiful Korean buttercream flowers, I can't be sure they work. So my hypothesis are just that, hypothesis. I need the water boiling advisory to lifted (soon!!) because I can't wait to test these hypothesis.

First, hidden in the mass "here's my email address/send me the recipe" comments in this thread, there are a couple of discreete clues.

Someone commented it all lies in knowing how butter reacts. It's a cryptic comment and like a riddle, waranted a good thought.

An other "lost in a sea of email address comments" clue was given and it was that it all lied in the technique used, not the recipe. Hmmmm..... I had determined already that Korean and Western recipes have a notable difference in butter content. So I gathered this comment must be half-true. Nothing against the commenter, she probably isn't as OCD as I am and never got into comparing as I compared Korean and Western recipes. Still, if the commenter hinted to a special technique/procedure, she must have good reasons to do so. 

An other comment was that "everything" must be cold. I interpreted this to mean the butter must be cold when added to the cooled down Italian meringue, as I explain below.

In baking, you use butter 3 ways.
- Cold butter
- Room temperature butter
- Melted butter

The mainstream way to make IMBC is to add room temp butter to the cooled-down Italian meringue. I assumed it's not the way Korean Buttercream Flower Wizzards do it or we all would have noticeably glossier IMBC even with a lower butter content in the recipe.

I eliminated the melted butter option. It will give us a soupy mess.

We're left with the "cold butter" option.

Hypothesis 1
Adding cold butter to the cooled-down meringue.
It might not be so desirable as I suspect it will take for ever to incorporate and might fatigue the sturdiest of Kitchenaids' motor before it fully mixes in the meringue.But... We never will know for sure unless tried.

Hypothesis 2
Adding cold butter to the still hot meringue.
It might work. Or not, if the butter melts fast and create a soupy mess of a buttercream. Or may be the soupy mess might be corrected with prolonged high speed mixing to beat it into a waxy submission? Only tests will tell (darn water-boiling advisory!)

Hypothesis 3
Adding cold butter to a precise meringue temperature. In French pastry, when we want to give an emulsion richness, mouthfeel and shine, we add butter in whatever (ganache, savory sauces, pastry creams...) at around 40ºC. That's just slightly above body temperature. Could it be it? Only a test will tell.

Seoul Milk Butter

It's definetly whiter in colour than North-American butter so it will take colouring much better, obviously.

I'm not convinced its high fat content is what makes Korean flowers more translucent.

I'm not about to import fresh butter from Seoul anytime soon, so I will never know for sure. Or maybe I'll know... If I achieve transluscency with my very Canadian, very pale yellow, lower-fat content, grocery store butter, that the Seoul Milk Butter isn't part of the puzzle.

There might be a way to tweak the results if substituting part of the butter for shortening. Maybe sticking with the widely 75/25 percent (butter to shortening) ratio so not to sacrifice too much the buttery taste and mouthfeel.

A video with good clues

I didn't skimp on video watching during my quest for an aswer to the Korean Buttercream Glossy Flowers. I watched everything I stumbled upon, attentively. I even watched Korean TV segments on the flower cakes trend.

Notice in the following video how she seems (emphasis on seems because those TV segments are usually highly edited) to add the butter
- cold (see when she cuts it?)
- all at once (rather than a bit at a time as per usual Western instructions)

Notice also the texture of the finished IMBC when she spoons it off of the bowl once she finished mixing it and then spoons it in the pastry bag. See how waxy it looks, compared to our regular fluffy, matte IMBC?

Whew! Post finished. That was looooonnnnng. Let's hope it'll serve us well to crack this mysterious buttercream. As I said, I can't wait to test this.

3 Months with searching, tests alot, with my knowledge about Butter, I have 3 my own Recipes about Glossy butter cream.

Yes, the cold is one of conditions for the Glossy and stranlucent, but not all the reasons

In my opinion, the most glossy, most stranlucent is not the most beautiful, I love the tasty more...And this is the reason I love Yougut Buttercream

There are my 3 own Recipe:

Today my internet can be upload the images, I love to show you the final products of my 3 recipes

1.Butter with milk

2.Butter with yogurt

3.Butter in IMBC

Any recipe can be glossy and stranlucent with your knowledge about Butter ( cold is one of them ).... just with what  recipe can be the most stranlucent or most glossy

I can see the differents in 3 recipes, the 3rdand 1st is not beautiful when keep in refrigaretor, but the 2nd always beautiful with me

Thank you Loyocakitchen for describing what works for you. I'm adding this info to the "test notebook" to try your option number 2, which, if I understand well, is an American frosting but made with all butter and yogurt rather than the traditional mostly shortening and milk or cream.

Tip tip tip:

Use italian method, whisk your white egg until it a little bit hard, boiling sugar,  pour in! Freeze the bowl and white egg in fridge for 15 minutes! Freeze also your butter (frezze mean freeze, mean very cold .. ;), and then whisk it with eggwhite! Whisk until it blended, take quite long time, ;) if you do it right, you will understand why I said it take long time! ;) 

further more,  search 

Kem bơ Hàn

in youtube, it seems our Vietnam friends disclose it! ;)

I wacthed this video in Youtuce, but can you see it glossy and stranlucent in the flower ( final product ) ????

No, I can not see it look like my Buttercream

Because, the way to make it look like just need to cold, very cold...But, it is 1 of the reasons, not all....

My buttercream flower, pic was taken y Iphone 5s

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@Zackydoo : I am so sorry, I can not answer you exactly because I just made cake 6 months, and 3 months with glossy buttercream cake, my knowledge is not large...Maybe I don't know American Frosting huhuhuhuhu

It is my yogurt buttercream[postimage id="5555" thumb="900"]

Hello everyone... I was fortunate enough to attend the original glossy korean buttercream class recently... I've myself been obsessed to find this very mysterious recipe and on the way did find one before attending her classes... I have to say though... the recipe is only 50% of the struggle... your nozzles have to be very narrow and your hand pressure has to be very even to get a good result....

The original glossy buttercream that is patented is indeed IMBC but with key differences... ( the artist itself has mentioned this) We were told, the Seoul milk butter is what gives it the translucent look... regular butter comes out glossy but not very translucent.... I have made a side by side comparison of my YC buttercream and the Korean Glossy buttercream,,, Personally I prefer mine as it is easier to make and I found it more glossier than the Korean recipe... The YC recipe is egg free,, If anyone wants to purchase the YC recipe it is available on the link below    https://www.etsy.com/listing/467217783/yc-buttercream-recipe

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Hi @ Loyocakitchen, is there a way that I can purchase your recipe for the yogurt buttercream? 

Hi Loyocakitchen,

Will you be selling your yogurt buttercream recipe?

The recipe which you are selling are using butter in imbc?

More interested in purchasing the yogurt buttercream recipe. 

thanks. 

Thank you panseluta for letting us know. Sorry that you are disappointed

Here's my work from butter cream recipe of @JYMum ‍ who's kindly share in This forum . 1st Picture is room temp condition you can see glossy ,but not stranlucent ,because made from Thai butter. nd pic just bring from refrigerator. My propose for this reply for ,say thank you and credit to her recipe. This recipe is real the best korea butter cream.

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@Wipaweew ‍ Hope you don't mind sharing @JYMum ‍ recipe here. She only provide to some of you and some of us didn't get. Thanks in advanced!!

@Wipaweew ‍ your buttercream flowers are sooo pretty.. gorgeous!! please share your recipe... [email protected]

Hi @Wipaweew ‍ ‍ I would really appreciate it if you could share your buttercream recipe @JYMum with me too. My email is [email protected]

Thank you in advance.

@JYMum or @wipawee, could you send me the recipe as well? THANKS! [email protected]

I don't know if this person is referring to the YC Buttercream.... If so, she hasnt reached out to me before posting here....but for those that might be mislead by the comment, i would like to add that the recipe includes a demonstration video that shows the recipe being made... the transclucency is depended also on the narrowness of the nozzle opening as mentioned earlier... the recipe has been sold over 50 times and i've received pictures of the flowers that have been piped.. they always come out super glossy! I spent days coming up with my recipe and I am upset with the way it has been portrayed...

Hi! @Wipaweew ‍ could you please share the recipe