This my new favorite frosting. If you haven’t tried the wonderful thing that is Swiss Meringue Buttercream, then please, please give this a try. It is sooo deliciously softly silky smooth with the most wonderful texture. Another thing about this lovely frosting is that it has only three ingredients (not counting colours and flavour of course.) You only need egg whites, granulated sugar (just regular ole sugar, no need for any of this fancy icing or caster sugar, nooo siree!)

If you get, the time I highly recommend Dyann Bake’s youtube video tutorial, it really helped me out a lot.

Ingredients  for one batch of SMBC

This is enough frosting to ice and fill one cake, or to make a ruffle cake – (keep in mind that those cakes require a lot frosting than usual to do the piped ruffles).

4 egg whites
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup butter

Take butter out of the fridge and cut it up into cubes while it is still cold (easier to cut up) and leave it on a plate to get to room temperature. You will want to introduce the butter to the frosting in a gradual manner, but it also needs to be soft at room temperature so that it incorporates smoothly and will not give you any lumps of cold butter.

In a clean glass or metal bowl, place your room-temp egg whites and whisk briskly with a pinch of salt (if you want. I mean you don’t really have to. It’s just what Dyann Bakes says to do. I’m not sure if it really makes a discernable difference, but it makes not much difference to me, so I do it anyway.

Whisk in sugar until the egg whites and sugar are thoroughly combined. Place bowl over a pot of simmering water and whisk vigorously for about 5 minutes, or until the sugar has completely dissolved.

Take the bowl off the heat and whip with a hand or stand mixer for another 5-7 minutes or until you reach stiff peaks. At the end of the stiff peaks, the bowl should no longer be hot (so that it doesn’t melt the butter when you incorporate it.) Here’s a handy note – this is essentially Seven Minute Frosting which could be used to frost a cake straight away if that tickles your fancy. I however, prefer the addition of butter for the Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

Have your room temperature butter cut up into pieces on hand as you will need to gradually add it into the frosting slowly.

About every 10 seconds or so, drop in a lump of butter until all the butter has smoothly incorporated into the frosting.

Tint and colour your frosting. I used Wilton’s pink paste here and some vanilla extract goes simply divine in this! Note : For some reason (for me, i’m not sure if this applies to other makers-of-SMBC;) my frosting seemed to develop the colours later on in the day. E.g. I added quite a bit of paste into this frosting because it didn’t seem to affect the colour too much, but later when I came back, it had turned a deep reddish colour (instead of the pale pink I was aiming for). So if this is the same for you, add a tiny bit of colour but don’t freak out if it doesn’t go the colour you want it to – let it stand in the fridge for an hour or so and it should be the colour you’re after. I also tried using a batch of SMBC the day ater I had made it and it tinted just fine straight away… Weird much?

See, it’s a very pale pink? I had actually used an insane amount of colouring in this.

Later on, the frosting looked like this ; (this pic also gives a good idea of how beautifully this frosting pipes. Keeps its shape soooo well. Also crusts, which I like).

Weird, huh? At least I’ve figured out a happ(ier) medium now anyway. I have used this frosting so far with brownie cupcakes and also on my ruffle cake with perfect results.

Enjoy this gorgeous frosting! I will never look back to butter-milk-icing sugar as my go-to frosting!!

xoxo

Christine

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