Vegan Buttercream Icing Recipe
Tried and tested recipe for vegan buttercream icing!
Ingredients
- 1 cup Vegetable Shortening
- 1 teaspoon Wilton's Clear Vanilla Extract
- 1 teaspoon Wilton's No Color Butter Flavor (Optional)
- 4 cups Confectioner's Icing Sugar
- a pinch Salt (optional)
- Approx 2 tablespoons Milk/Water (As Required)
Instructions
- In a bowl, add the shortening, vanilla and butter flavoring and 2 tablespoons of water. Cream until light and fluffy.
- Add sugar one cup at a time and beat after each addition until all the ingredients have been thoroughly mixed together.
- Blend an additional minute or so, until creamy. This produces 3 cups of stiff consistency icing.
- For medium consistency, add 1 teaspoon of water to each cup of stiff consistency icing. For thin consistency, add 2 teaspoons of water for each cup of stiff consistency icing.
Notes
- You could use Butter Flavor All-Vegetable Shortening. In that case, you can omit the Wilton's Butter Flavoring. I couldn't find butter flavored shortening so I had to use the usual one and hence I added 1 teaspoon of butter flavoring. If using the extra teaspoon of butter flavoring, go slow while adding the water. Also look for trans fat-free shortening. I was not able to find it and used the regular one and each serving has 0.3gm trans fat.
- Icing consistency is key while decorating a cake. But don't worry if you don't get it right because fixing it is quite easy. If the icing is very thin add some icing sugar until yo get the required stiffness. If it's too stiff add water (drop by drop) to dilute it.
- Milk or water can be used while preparing the frosting but I read elsewhere that using water is better.
- Icing keeps good for 2 weeks when stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
- The Wilton cake decorating course book which was supplied to us during the class, has a lot of useful information, tips, and tricks organized in a neat manner. You can also find this on their site. The information on the website is spread all over, so I'll give some important links in the next section.
Taste & Texture
- Even though the name of the icing is Buttercream, we don't actually use butter. Instead, we use solid white shortening. That gives the pure white color (so when you decide to mix colors you can get better shades) and also the correct structure for the designs. To keep the icing at it's whitest we use the Wilton's clear Vanilla Extract and no color Butter Flavoring. The usual vanilla extra is in dark brown color and when it's added it will tint the shortening and the icing will not be in the purest white.
- I saw a couple of recipes, where only butter is used or half butter and half shortening is used, but I have tried it only with shortening. As I have mentioned earlier I didn't want to experiment too much at this initial stage of learning. I read quite a lot of reviews, that some people don't like the greasy aftertaste that shortening gives and so they used butter instead. I felt that when the icing is consumed together with the cake you don't feel the greasiness but you definitely feel it when you eat the icing alone. Also, the vessels get very greasy and it's messy to do the dishes in the sink. Better use the dishwasher. The taste is really good though, just like the bakery ones. I actually was experimenting with white cake recipes. So for the 3 cakes, I baked during the course I tried 3 different recipes and felt that the icing really covers up even if the cake is not that good. Can you believe that this frosting is actually vegan?
