Basic Buttercream

Light, airy and silky, this versatile frosting has all of the qualities typical of a well-made Italian meringue buttercream.

One of my daughters, whose only experience is with American buttercream, wanted to try her hand at making this recipe so I left her alone with the book, a scale, a thermapen and a stand mixer. The directions are very thorough and clearly written so she had no trouble making the sugar syrup and the Italian meringue, and when the emulsion in the buttercream broke as the butter was added, she knew exactly how to fix the problem.

This is a base recipe that requires flavouring of some sort before it’s used. We flavoured the entire batch with peanut butter, used a portion for the better nutter cookies and the rest to decorate my son’s peanut butter birthday cake.

I gave the recipe only 4 stars as I think it’s too sweet, calling for over 80% more sugar than this recipe, which is the one I normally use.