Ingredients: strawberries, unsalted butter, powdered sugar, vanilla extract, cream · 30 min cook time · 1285kcal · ₩15,000
Instructions
1. First off, grab some strawberries. If it's strawberry season, use fresh strawberries. If it's not, use frozen strawberries. Hull your strawberries and pop them into a blender. You could also use a food processor if you wanted to. This buttercream is pure strawberry flavor, really balances the sweetness of the American buttercream when you have fresh fruit in there. And it comes together so easily. And one of my favorite things about this buttercream is the color. It's this wonderful, beautiful pink color and it's all natural. These are nice strawberries, they're actually pink on the inside. If you opened yours up and they're pure white and have no flavor, grab a bag of frozen ones. I'm using about six large berries. You want to end up with half a cup of strawberries once they're blended.
2. Grab your blender. We're going to whiz these up just until it's basically liquefied. If this happens, it's totally fine. Don't worry. Just tamp those berries down. We're not blending that many. A lot of machines don't like having small quantities of things. It goes for my stand mixer, to a hand mixer, to a food processor, to a blender. Pulse, pulse, pulse. You can also do this by hand. Thanks for getting things started, blender. Blender saw those strawberries and said, not today, John. Okay. You can mash these up with a fork too. And I love having some texture in this. So, some people might want to like blend it completely, strain it so there's no seeds. I like having these little splashes of red fruit throughout the buttercream and you get a kind of extra zingy note here and there. A muddler is also a great tool for this. For me, this is the perfect texture. A little bit of lumping, a little bit of the skin showing, but it's mostly liquefied.
3. Set this aside and now grab either your stand mixer or a hand mixer with a big bowl. If you're using a stand mixer, you have a choice: a paddle or a whisk. So, most recipes, including mine, say to use a paddle. A whisk is also an option. If you use a whisk, you're going to whip so much air into your butter, which is a really good thing. But, I'm setting that aside because especially for any frosting with fresh fruit in it, you're going to have massive bubbles come in just as soon as you're done whipping. So, it's a best practice to use a paddle attachment. If you're making a chocolate buttercream or a vanilla buttercream, I would say either or and I actually prefer the whisk. But for this one, we want to kind of control how much air we whip into things because the looseness of the strawberry mixture just causes chaos in the texture. You'll see this later on. For this recipe, we're using one cup or 226 grams of unsalted room temperature butter. And this is so important. Room temperature butter isn't melting into a pool. It's not so soft that you could spread it on toast like. Room temperature butter can take your finger with a little bit of pressure and yield. And I can bend it too. So, it's bending and not breaking, but it's not falling into a puddle. You want the butter to be soft enough to whip, but have the control to retain some structure. If it was too loose, it would just form a puddle and it wouldn't get air whipped into it and then it wouldn't have that wonderful creamy texture we need. I also want you to look at the color. I have some butter that's set aside so we can do a before and after. But right now, it's a pale yellow color. When we're done, it should be so much whiter and brighter just from the air that got beaten in. Close your mixer off. Pop it to medium to medium high and we're going to beat this for about three minutes. And yes, at some point, you should scrape the bowl down. Part of the reason you want to scrape your bowl down is everything got whipped on the inside, but on the outside and the bottom, they're mostly just compacted. So, you really want all of your butter to be the same consistency, so it pipes the same, it tastes the same, it accepts the other flavors the same. Homogeneous. One more minute. You have to see this. Creamy, dreamy and look at the color. This is the after and this is the before. Lighter and brighter and the texture is completely different.
4. Measure out about a quarter cup of the strawberry puree. And you're definitely going to have some more, but that is so delicious. It can go onto pancakes, into your smoothie, or right into your mouth. And if you want some extra strawberry flavor, you can add more of this later on. Add the puree in, beat on medium and scrape the bowl down one more time. As soon as you add the strawberry mixture in, you're going to think, oh my God, what is this nonsense? Because it totally does not mix in. Water and butter don't mix very well. The sugar will fix that. We're just going to give this a head start. You definitely need to scrape the bowl down though because otherwise, it'll just be pure butter on the bottom and way too liquidy on top of all the strawberries. All right, mix that up one more time. So, let it get nice and thoroughly mixed in. Then we'll reduce our speed to low and add our sugar in bit by bit. Look at how pretty this is already. And this is why I do not like to over process my strawberries. All those little flecks of red throughout are gorgeous. For this recipe, you'll want about six cups of powdered sugar. That's 720 grams. Add it in a cup at a time. Mix on low so that it doesn't create a mess. If you're wondering what magic the sugar can do to bring the wet strawberries and the butter together, the sugar's slightly abrasive. If you rub it between your fingers, it's a little bit gritty. And it'll just kind of grind the two together until they're basically one. You'll still have those bits of strawberries if you didn't strain your mixture though. Cup number three. Four. Keeping track. We fluffed our butter up plenty. Now we're actually deflating it. That's why we're running this mixture on low. I don't want to beat more air into it because our buttercream will get foamy. If you've ever had buttercream you tried to decorate something and it's filled with air bubbles all around, there's too much air whipped in. So, reduce your mixer to low, go nice and slow at this point. I'm not going to lie, this is one of the most frustrating parts ever for making any frosting. This stuff on the handle. It drives me crazy. Five. We're actually adding a little bit more sugar than you think you need as far as the texture goes. It'll get slackened up in just a bit with some cream and vanilla. Last cup of sugar, six. 720 grams. As soon as all that sugar's incorporated, I'm going to add a teaspoon of vanilla in. It gives you a wonderful extra depth of flavor, but you can skip it if you don't want to have it. And for a final bit of creaminess and to slacken the mixture, two tablespoons of cream. But, if you want, this is my secret. You don't have to use cream. You could use lemon juice. I love using lemon juice for a strawberry lemonade vibe. It really gives you an extra zing and more lift, which creates a buttercream that feels light and refreshing. But the cream is wonderful too. They're both good vibes.
5. One final scrape down. It's hard to show you visually, but the texture is so different from the top and the bottom because we added the vanilla and the cream in. The top is very slack and creamy, and the bottom is much more dense and compacted. So, it's so important to do this. Even though it's so annoying to get stuff on your handle. Here's the deal. If you use this immediately, it's amazing. But chances are, you're going to have to wait for a second. You have a cake that's cooling, the cupcakes are coming out of the oven, or, you know, you're just finding your piping bags and stuff. So, in those few minutes, your buttercream will go from amazing to foamy nonsense. And if that happens to you, it's okay. All you have to do is give it a whip. So, that's all you need. Maybe 30 seconds, you can go on low. You can even use a spatula. You see all these little bubbles coming through? That just happens when you have any kind of fresh fruit in a buttercream. Part of it is because the fruit is hydrophilic and the butter is hydrophobic. They're not mixed very well. What you can do is use a spatula and just press some of them out like this. It'll also help reinvigorate the texture. Just like that, right before using it. And it'll be much creamier. Just before you load your piping bag up, whip, whip, whip, whip. And once it's nice and creamy to your satisfaction, load it in. Never overfill a piping bag. You want to have better control and a giant, a giant tube of frosting is not fun. So, fill it up halfway or less. I have to show you how beautifully this pipes. This is an 869, it's a large open star tip, one of my favorites. You can see when we pipe this out, it's perfectly smooth, very crisp, but it's so soft and luscious. It pipes beautifully on a cake, cupcake, or right onto a spoon if you want to take a taste test. It's refreshing, zingy, full of fresh strawberry flavor, and I love the way it looks with that soft pink color and streaks of strawberries throughout. I hope you get a chance to make this recipe. And if you like this video, check out my buttercream playlist.