Hi all

I have been baking for a while now but just started decorating about a year ago, the problem o question I have is...how do you all get your buttercream soooo white???

 Mine is always yellowish or cream in colour, I know this is because of the butter that I use but I have never seen white butter! do you use something else in it or add white colouring??

Btw Im not from USA so please dont tell me I need to use crisco LOL  I see this in lots of recipes etc but havent been able to find it in Ireland

Thans in advance

AThe very whites are made with crisco, sorry! Or any solid white vegetable shortening, I suppose. You can make yours a little whiter by adding a tiny dab of violet color to it, there is white food color that is titanium dioxide, and also clear vanilla will help!

Can you buy undyed margarine locally?  in Canada it used to come with small patches of the yellow colour, so that you could have it white if you wanted. 

 

Margarine has more or less the same water content as butter--you make a direct replacement for butter, weight for weight.

 

Vegetable shortening comes by different names.

Thanks Annabakescakes

if I mixed my butter with a veg shortening would it change the flavour much or just make it milder?? Ive been using the same brand for a long time for its taste everyone comments on the taste of my btc

Hi BakingIrene thanks

I dont think Ive ever seen undied margerine but will def have a look for it :)

A

It will make it a bit milder, but I prefer it. If you don't want the taste to change, the titanium dioxide is the best bet. But as long as you use brown vanilla and real butter, it won't be white white. I think it's a good trade-off, myself! I would rather have mine a bit yellow and flavorful, than white and tasteless.

If you use several coats of buttercream, you could use your yummy buttercream as a base coat, and a whiter one as a final coat.

Thank you very much, I appreciate the help :)

Trex is the UK and Irish equivalent of Crisco, it's in the supermarket. Or you can probably buy Crisco from Amazon or somewhere.
 

I use Italian Mousseline Buttercream. It's slightly off-white, but I think it's fine for a wedding cake. Actually, I find that adding the regular vanilla tempers the color of the butter a bit and makes it look a little whiter. 

 

I use the leftover yolks for chocolate buttercream.

Try adding a drop (and I do mean a drop!) of blue color to your icing. Mix well. You may not get the very white color you get with shortening, but it will be whiter.
 

I think Frytex is the Irish equivalent. It's with the solid fats in the supermarket.

The difference between butter and shortening is not only in taste, but in texture.  It doesn't melt in your mouth and just doesn't taste as rich,  IMO.  I use a mix of butter and cream cheese for my buttercream, which is wonderful but it too, is not white-white.  

 

Normally this is not really a problem, but recently I made a cake with fondant snowflakes and I really wanted it to be white so I got to thinking...I use thin layers of highly  colored frosting to cover the regular buttercream on my colored cakes...why not make a white frosting and use a couple of thin layer of that?

 

So because I don't use shortening I mixed cream cheese and powdered sugar to a frosting consistency and spread it on in two thin layers over my regular buttercream which I had gotten cold and hard in the fridge.  It worked great and because it had cream cheese in it, the flavor blended well with the regular BC..in fact you really could not taste the difference and it gave me the white color I was looking for. HTH!

AIf you use full fat butter it can be quite yellow. Try using a low fat butter. A farmer said its what the cows eat that determine how yellow it is. You have to find the right brand, my cake supplier in Sydney knows a particular brand, which ofcorse I've forgotten.

AI'm a h

I'm a hairdresser by trade, we make bleached yellow hair white by adding violet/purple toner, so this makes total sense lol :)

I make BC with all butter (yellow and full fat) and bourbon vanilla. 

 

I add in a few scant drops of violet gel/paste color and I get a lovely white BC with no change in flavor or consistency.  Such an easy fix.

 

Rae

Thank you very much all, very sweet to take the time to reply, and have given me a lot to think about and loads of new things to try

I'm definitely with "Annabakescakes" on this one: I use all butter, and all real vanilla, and let the color be what it is. If I'm doing maple or maple-cinnamon buttercream, I do it with real Vermont B (for the robustness; any of the A grades would get lost in all the powdered sugar!), and for strawberry, I use strawberry jam (along with a bit of strawberry extract). I haven't yet gotten to the point of grinding my own cinnamon, though, although back in first or second grade, I once participated in a class exercise of churning our own butter.

I use a recipe from the Wilton forums, it uses an even mix of butter and shortening.  The first step is to beat the two together for 6-7 minutes, just let it run with the stand mixer.    It turns them  white.  I have no idea why/how that happens, but it does.  Might be something you could try with your recipe.

how long are you beating your butter?  I know that the longer I beat the butter it seems that the butter lightens up.  I wonder if beating longer would help, or if there is just a point where it is too yellow to lighten up enough. 

Here is a link where there is the recipe and a number of followup questions and answers about the recipe.
http://www.wilton.com/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=7&threadid=132579
The butter and shortening are beaten for 7-8 minutes on a KA speed 6 or 4 if using a beater blade. 

A

we churned butter in the 2nd grade at Sopori Elementary School in Amado, Arizona. I loved doing it and it is a strong memory! We used tinker toys for the paddle and a small coffee can with a hole in the lid. When we were done, we spread on saltine crackers, and it was gross! Lol, the teacher said it needed salt. I have talked about it several times over the last 25 years and and no one I know did that exercise, funny you did, too!

Amado huh? That's an area of AZ I haven't explored much. That and the Northeastern part. Is it pretty? Looks like it's higher elevation desert like Tucson?

When I need "white as possible" SMBC, I just don't add any vanilla. And it does *not* taste like a stick of butter. I know some do, but not mine...yummy.

A

I It is so beautiful! Natural Rick formations and cliffs and things. I remember when I was riding in the car with my grandma, she pointed out the sky was blue that if she were paint the exact color if it in one of her paintings, no one would believe her! I was born in Tucson, at Pima Co. Hospital. My grandpa was an engineer at Chamberlain, in the Mexico side of Nogales. (Which was a ghetto back then, even.)

Oh, and to stay on track, I have used Americolor's white icing color in my fondant successfully, but not so much in my buttercream.