Delicious buttercream frosting recipe with endless flavor possibilities

Hi Bold Bakers, we've had great success with our crazy series, from crazy bread, to cookies and even muffins. Well the next installment in this series is something that I think you're going to find really useful. It is crazy frosting. One frosting, endless flavor possibilities. Now as always, the recipe for this can be found on BiggerBolderBaking.com along with all of my other recipes. Ok let's get started by whipping up our butter. So here I have my room temperature butter, now this is really important because you want it to whip up well. So have it out at room temperature for at least a few hours. Now as you can see I am using a stand mixer but feel free to use an electric hand mixer as well. So the first important step in frosting making is to whip the butter up all by itself just to get some air into it. And this will take around 8 minutes on high speed. Okay, time is up and this is exactly what you want. It's pale in color and it's light and fluffy. So at this stage we're going to add in our icing sugar. Now my icing sugar is sifted And you want to do this to make sure that there's no lumps and you also get air into your icing sugar. The name of the game here is air. That's what's going to yield you a lovely frosting. So now another secret to frosting making is adding in the sugar slowly, spoonful by spoonful. Add in a little bit, let it whip up, and then add another little bit in. And we just keep on doing this. It takes a few minutes, but it will yield you a really fluffy frosting. You would not believe the amount of messages I get on a daily basis about people struggling with frosting. But honestly it is not that hard. If you just follow a few of my simple tips you will have success every time. Okay so our sugar is all in here. While the machine is still running on a medium speed, I'm going to add in a little bit of milk. Now all this does is just lighten up your frosting. Lovely. Then I'm gonna add in a little bit of vanilla extract. This is what we're going to use for the base. Now what we want to do for the last few minutes is is whip this up on a high speed again for roughly 3-4 minutes. So this is what your frosting should look like once you're done. Check that out. It is thick, it has gotten really pale in color, it is fluffy, look at all those air bubbles. This is what we're going for. Now we're gonna take this and make it all different flavors. So you are going to see with the addition of just one or two ingredients, how you can make pretty much any frosting flavor you like. The first one I'm gonna start out with is fudge frosting. Now what we're going to do here is add in some cocoa powder. Now I like to use unsweetened cocoa powder, I don't use dutch processed because it actually can be quite bitter and not very nice to eat raw. Also if you're thinking to yourself I don't have cocoa powder but I do have hot chocolate powder, do not use that. Hot chocolate powder is not the same thing, it has sugar in it and all sorts of funny stuff, so you want to go for unsweetened cocoa powder. So here I'm just showing you how to mix a little bit of frosting, but on the website I've got how you can flavor the whole batch. And also the beauty of this recipe is if you want to make a batch of buttercream frosting and flavors chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, all out of the same batch, you can do that. Ok perfect, this is looking great, there's our chocolate, I'm gonna set this aside and the next flavor we're going to make is a strawberry frosting. So now I get a lot of requests for strawberry frosting because it goes really well with any type of vanilla cake, especially in the summer. So what I have here is a little bowl of strawberry puree, and I'm going to add that into my frosting. Now you only want to add in a little bit because if you add too much liquid it can make your buttercream very soft and also it might separate it, so you just want to add in a little bit. I like to use fresh strawberry puree because of the flavor but if there's some sort of a strawberry extract out there you could also use that. So now there's a method to my madness why I'm showing you how to make chocolate and strawberry frosting. Next week it's Bigger Bolder Baking's 4th birthday and I'm going to make this gorgeous three layered Neapolitan cake and you're going to need these frostings for it. So store that in the back of your noggin and come back and watch that video. Okay set that over to the side and we're going to make our next frosting. So our next frosting that we're making is actually a peanut butter frosting, now this goes so great with chocolate cakes, it just really balances them out, chocolate and peanut butter go so well together. So here I have some smooth peanut butter and then all we're going to do is mix it in. So next week I actually have two videos coming your way and the second one is going to be be a chocolate and peanut butter cake and it is to die for. So you're not gonna want to miss that and you're gonna need this frosting for it. Okay this is looking good, I'm gonna give it a taste. Oh yeah, salty and sweet man. Can't beat it, mmm. The next frosting we're going to make is a lovely lemon. So this is really simple, all you need is a lemon, fresh one, and a zester. And all you want to do is just grate the zest into your frosting. As much or as little as you want. I love this flavor because it reminds me of springtime and it's just like really fresh and light tasting, it's just so yummy. Okay and then all you do is simply stir that in. So now I know lemon is usually a yellow color so if you want you can add in a little tiny bit of yellow food coloring just to give it a little bit of a tint of yellow and mix that in. But that's totally up to you. And remember use good quality food dye or my homemade food dyes. Okay lovely. That's another flavor, I like the variety that we're doing, we've got chocolate covered, fruit, then something fresh like lemon, gonna set this aside and move on to our next one. The next one up is my personal favorite, coffee flavored frosting. So coffee granules are my secret weapon when it comes to flavoring any of my desserts coffee. The thing about these is that they're concentrated flavor so you add a tiny bit of liquid to it, dissolve it, and then you've got a concentrated punch of coffee. The thing about it is it doesn't make great coffee to drink but it is perfect for baking. to our frosting, and then you know where I'm going after this, mix it all together. So you know when you're a kid and it comes around to your birthday and you always get your favorite like chocolate or funfetti, when I was young all I wanted was coffee cake. That's every single year I wanted coffee cake and I would eat so much of it, and still to this day it's my favorite cake. Okay I'm gonna set that aside and we're gonna get on to our next frosting. Last but not least, a really fun flavor as an ice cream and a frosting, it's mint chocolate chip. So here I have some chocolate bar that I chopped up, it was a nice bittersweet bar. So I'm going to add that in there. Next we're going to add in a little bit of mint extract. Now you know that I've made my own before on Bigger Bolder Baking, it's really easy, or you can use good quality store bought. Now mint chocolate chip is always traditionally colored green, you can decide to do that or not. But I'm going to add in a tiny little drop of food coloring, and then stir it all up. And you'll start to see it come together and really start to smell and look like mint chocolate chip. Mint and chocolate go really well together so this frosting would be really great on any of my chocolate cakes or cupcakes. Give it a taste. Oh yeah, yum, I love, love mint. If you love mint, you're gonna love this frosting. Now that you know how to make crazy frosting, the world is your oyster and you can make any flavor your heart desires. Make sure you share photos of your crazy creations on my website because I love seeing them. And I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.