Learn how to make white buttercream with these simple tips and tricks! Perfect for wedding cakes, winter white cakes, and when you need a white buttercream base to start from.
The best way to get pure white buttercream is to use ghee. This is what you see in most new grocery store cakes. Simple American buttercream made with ghee and powdered sugar.
However, most bakers (myself included) prefer to use butter rather than shortening in their buttercream. It not only gives better flavor but also better texture.
Mind you, I won’t turn up my nose at any buttercream frosting, shortbread or not, and I’m a big fan of delicious grocery store cakes.
Chances are that if you use real butter it will come out yellow. The extent of the yellow depends on some factors which I cover below. This is less than optimal for several reasons:
- Sometimes you need pure white buttercream frosting (wedding cake)
- It’s best to start with a white base when adding other colors so as not to tint it yellow (for example, adding blue to yellow buttercream will result in a green color).
In today’s article I’m going to talk about things you can do to prevent your buttercream from becoming too yellow, and things you can do to make your buttercream white or neutralize the yellow color.
Let’s get straight into it…
How to make white buttercream
There are a few things you can do to help make your buttercream whiter – by starting with a lighter base, avoiding color additives (vanilla), and residual yellow tint.
Step #1 – Choose your butter wisely
Buttercream can vary greatly in color, and if you are looking for white buttercream, I suggest you try to find buttercream that is as white as possible. Just look at this picture from HowDaily where they compared different brands of butter.
Crazy right??
The difference in butter color depends on the cow’s diet.
Grass-fed cows have a diet rich in beta-carotene, and the butter produced from their milk will be more yellow. Whereas grain-fed cows lack beta-carotene and tend to produce milk that makes butter paler.
Organic butter will generally be richer in color than regular butter. You can learn more about that here.
Step #2 – Whip it well
For American style buttercream, this is easy. Beat the daylights out of the butter before adding the sugar. Make it very pale and fluffy, then add the sugar and beat some more.
This will help give you a lighter base to start with.
For Italian and Swiss buttercream or German buttercream, you can pre-cream the butter before adding it to the buttercream.
I haven’t done it, but it should help. At the very least, give it a good, long beat once you’ve added all the butter until it’s nice, light and fluffy.
For German buttercream, it will be more difficult because the pastry cream will add a yellow color to it as well. Read on for more tips on how to combat this.
Step #3 – Skip the vanilla
Vanilla, or any other colored flavor, will tint the buttercream. If you want to use vanilla, I recommend pure vanilla extract. However, it has an artificial taste similar to candy.
However, using plain vanilla is not a deal breaker. If you choose a lighter butter and beat it well, you can do the following steps to whiten it more.
Step No. 4 – Neutralize the yellow color
The violet-tinted gel helps neutralize the yellow color found in the buttercream.
If you look at a color wheel, you can see that yellow and purple are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Colors on opposite ends of the spectrum tend to cancel each other out.
That’s why your hairstylist advises you to use purple shampoo on blonde hair! It helps get rid of those yellow/brassy tones.
For the buttercream, you only want to add a small amount of purple at the end to help get rid of the yellow tint. Dip a toothpick into the colored gel and then dip that toothpick into the frosting.
The amount on the toothpick above is more than what you added. I basically ran the toothpick over the buttercream on the whisk, so I only used one side of it. And that was for a large amount of buttercream.
I recommend starting with a smaller amount and adding more as needed.
Cake tip!
Be careful not to add too much purple gel or the buttercream will turn grey.
Give the frosting a good whip and check the color. Add more purple as needed, but don’t add too much or the frosting will start to turn grey/blue/purple.
This before and after is the same as the buttercream recipe:
The cake on the left is my vanilla cake recipe. For the white cake on the right, I used a lighter colored buttercream, pure vanilla extract, and added some purple gel at the end.
Step #5 – Add the bright white color gel
Another great option is to add some bright white gel to the decorations. I don’t find that this works well on its own, but combined with some of the other tips above it will help make your buttercream white.
Colored gels (purple and white) will also give a brighter color to your white chocolate ganache which naturally has a yellow tint as well.
I hope you find these tips about How to make white buttercream cooperating! Let me know if you try it or if you have any other tips that work for you.
Check out my other baking tips!
Summary of how to make white buttercream
Buttercream recipes
The recipe I’m including below is for my favorite American buttercream frosting. Be sure to check out my Swiss Buttercream , Flour Buttercream , and German Buttercream recipes too!
White buttercream
Learn how to make white buttercream with these simple tips and tricks! Perfect for wedding cakes and when you need a white buttercream base to start with.
Shares 5 Cups – Enough to frost an 8-inch two-layer cake
Calories 1257Kcal
ingredients
directions
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Set up a stand mixer with a whisk attachment.
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Beat the butter until pale, fluffy and creamy.
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Reduce speed to low and add powdered sugar one cup at a time until well combined. Increase the speed to medium and beat for 3 minutes.
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Add pure vanilla and two tablespoons of cream and continue whipping at medium speed for one minute.
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Add more cream as needed until desired consistency is reached (I added 4 tablespoons each).
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Dip a toothpick in a small amount of the purple jelly and add it to the buttercream. Whip to combine.
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Add more violet if necessary and/or some bright white gel. Whisk until frosting is smooth and silky.
Calories: 1257KcalCarbohydrates: 144gprotein: 1gfat: 78gSaturated fat: 49gCholesterol: 212mgSodium: 18mgPotassium: 31mgsugar: 141gVitamin A: 2445IUCalcium: 30mgiron: 1mg
Nutritional information and measurement conversions are automatically calculated. I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this data. If this is important to you, please verify this using your favorite nutrition calculator and/or metric conversion tool.
2020-12-17 21:24:00
