Buttercream Frosting or Butter Icing

Buttercream frosting or butter icing just has to rank right up there as both the easiest icing to make and use, and also as the most popular. It has limitations in terms of decorative effects, but nonethless is slathered upon cake after cake after cake - from large to small, from amateur to professional. Butter icing is particularly useful as a binding ingredient in terms of sticking cakes together (as in a sandwich cake), and when you are wanting to place fondant upon a firm cake - such as the Hat Cake I made for my daughter's 5th birthday

The fondant only sticks to the buttercream icing

As you may gather, I am a great advocate of butter: in cakes, for its ability to have air beaten into it and hence capable of rising in the oven; in biscuits, since it creates a meltingly tender effect; in icing or frosting simply for the taste. As the name "buttercream" suggests, however, frosting made with real butter will not produce a white topping; for that I would advocate either a cream cheese frosting or a fluffy white frosting made with whipped egg whites, and you would need to use a colourless essence, such as almond, for flavourant, else it will colour the icing. You can apparently also buy colourless vanilla; since I tend to make multi-coloured icing anyway, I am not concerned with colour issues, and I always prefer to use natural as opposed to synthetic products. 

Buttercream Frosting or Butter Icing Recipe:

300 g butter (2½ sticks, or 1⅓ cup)

700 g icing sugar, sieved (5½ cups) 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or more) or other flavourant

Milk, as needed for spreadability, tablespoon by tablespoon

Although the above quantities are possibly double what you need for a single, unlayered, large cake, it is remarkable how much you will use, particularly if you are making multiple colours out of the icing, and also because children prove remarkably adept at licking the spoons involved: 

The wild and colourful results of kid's decorating efforts

For my daughter's Hat Cake, I adapted the recipe by adding a bit more icing sugar and a lot more milk to make a thinner icing so that it was easy to spread not only in-between the cake layers but, since, after they had been stacked they had been cut into the requisite shape, a fair number of crumbs resulted, which meant I needed to employ an icing that would glide on to the shape and adhere, rather than pull off the cake, bringing with it even more crumbs.  

I have discovered that any left-over icing keeps remarkably well in the fridge (unfortunately, my children have recently also discovered this fact). Even icing made with extra milk keeps well; sugar after all is a well-known natural preservative which kills bacteria by means hypertonic dehydration, that is, water is drawn out from micro-organisms via the process of osmosis. In fact, bedevilled as we are in our garden by bougainvillea thorns, my kids prefer it if I put on a poultice of equal amounts of soft soap and sugar on overnight to draw out the thorn rather than dig around in an already sore area (though obviously we check for signs of greater infection, such as a red line of track marks radiating from the area which would indicate a more serious problem that needs medical attention). 

I always use a taste test with regard to the proportions of butter and sugar and I also tend to add a lot more vanilla essence than is generally advocated, since I find kids, both big and small, love vanilla so am not chary with the essence (and no, the costs of vanilla pods are somewhat prohibitive so I seldom use pods, but I do try, budget-willing, to use proper vanilla essence - except when I know the cake will be eaten by those who don't use alcohol, such as my Muslim friends).