This delicious vanilla buttercream recipe is a must if you bake regularly! This buttercream does not taste like butter and that makes it suitable for many applications.
What is buttercream?
Buttercream is a cream that mainly consists of butter, but also a thickened milk-flour mixture, which ensures that you can whip the buttercream up nicely so that it does not get an intense and massive butter taste. I use this recipe as a basis for almost all cupcakes and many cake fillings also have this buttercream as a base. This recipe is very easy to make and can be used widely. And the best thing for me is the taste because I don’t like creams in which you can clearly taste the butter. Highly recommended so this vanilla buttercream. You can also add other flavours to it, I’ll explain more about that below the recipe.
How do you make gluten-free buttercream?
You don’t think about it that quickly until you have made buttercream yourself, but to make a good airy buttercream you need flour and this is of course not gluten-free. I haven’t tested how to make a gluten-free buttercream myself, but luckily the Laura’s Bakery readers have. For example, I read in the comments that you can replace the flour 1:1 with a gluten-free variant, or with 28 grams of corn flour, for example. So you can easily make a gluten-free variant with the recipe below!
Basic recipe vanilla buttercream
This buttercream recipe is easy to make and gives a delicious result. A buttercream that does not taste like butter, is also good to indicate flavours.
INGREDIENTS
- 45 grams of flour
- 240 ml of milk
- 200 grams of unsalted butter
- 200 grams of powdered sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
INSTRUCTIONS
- Sift the flour and put it in a saucepan with the milk, whisk the flour into the milk with a whisk so that there are no lumps. Put the pan on the fire and keep stirring while you slowly bring it to a boil. Once it boils, turn the heat down.
- The mixture will now thicken, and after about five minutes it will be thick enough. You can check this by sticking a wooden skewer into the mixture, it will stand upright if the mixture is good. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and cover with plastic wrap, let cool to room temperature. It is important that this mixture is smooth and contains no lumps. If there are already lumps in it, it is best to press it through a sieve.
- While the mixture is cooling down, beat the butter and icing sugar in another bowl. Then add the vanilla extract and keep mixing until everything is incorporated.
- Once the flour mixture has cooled down you can add it to the butter mixture. Beat the mixture well for another five minutes. Then put the bowl back in the fridge for about half an hour. After that, your vanilla buttercream is ready to use!
You can also prepare and store buttercream very well. I will tell you about this in detail in this article, where I also explain, for example, what you should pay attention to when you store the buttercream in the fridge.
This is how you give a flavour to your buttercream
The handy thing about this buttercream is that you can vary endlessly with it. I have already given it many different flavours: Cinnamon, caramel, blueberry, hazelnut, chocolate, strawberry and much more. In fact, anything is possible with this buttercream! If you are adding your own flavour to the vanilla buttercream, add the ‘flavour’ a little at a time and taste to see if you need to add more. It’s a shame if you seem to have added too much and can’t reverse it. In addition, your buttercream can go into a mess if you add too much liquid at once.
In this article, I share with you all my tips about adding flavours to your buttercream. You can already find these flavours on the blog:
- White chocolate buttercream
- Caramel buttercream
- Oreo buttercream
- Lemon buttercream
This is how you use buttercream
Buttercream can of course be used in many recipes. Here are some recipes and articles where I’ve used it:
- Smear cake tightly
- Oreo cake
- Stroopwafel Cupcakes
- Apple cinnamon cupcakes
It is often asked whether this buttercream is also suitable for spraying flowers and other decorations. It’s not completely impossible, but it’s better to use a ‘buttercream icing’ for that. This is a typical American recipe based on vegetable fat. It is firmer so that the flowers keep their shape well. There is currently no recipe for this on Laura’s Bakery.
And one last tip: I wouldn’t use this buttercream if you also want to cover the cake with fondant. There is a chance that your fondant will melt a bit and that is of course a shame. Especially if you want to keep the cake for a while. It is better to use a 1:1 buttercream (butter and icing sugar) for smearing. If you do not cover the cake with fondant, you can of course just use this cream to cover it. Even if you want to turn it into a drip cake afterwards.