How to Make Frostings, Icings & Glazes | Bake It Up a Notch with Erin McDowell

it's the intro my bandanna shaketh as i okay [Music] hi i'm erin g mcdowell and welcome to this episode of bake it up a notch i'm so excited about this episode because i've been reading about it in the comments from so many of you because you've seen in some of our past episodes the piping episode the layer cake episode the macaron episode i've been using lots of different frostings icings and even glazes but i've never showed you exactly how to make them but that changes today we're gonna dive deep on all things frostings icings and glazes and show you everything you need to know and as always we're doing it bake it up a notch style we're going to show you all the equipment that you need we're going to show you a bunch of different types of frostings icings and glazes and of course we're going to show you where things could go wrong and how to fix it so if this sounds like something you're interested in or if you've loved past episodes of bake it up a notch do me a favor and be sure to click like and subscribe so you can be made aware as new episodes become available it's gonna be a very sweet episode so let's get baking [Music] so let's dive into some of the equipment you're going to need to make your frostings icings glazes and and all those good sweet things luckily there's not a lot of it but there are a few things that can really make the process easier and smoother throughout so of course i've got my classic silicone spatulas here i've also of course you could use whisks it kind of depends on which consistency you're working with thinner things like glazes might benefit from the use of a whisk whereas something thicker could benefit from the scraping abilities of a spatula in those early stages of preparation you might need a pot you might need a pot for something like cooking sugar if you're making an italian buttercream but you also might need a pot to cook some of the other ingredients that are going to go inside maybe break down some fruit that you're going to use in your glaze or frosting or icing eventually the other thing is that a pot could be used sort of as a makeshift double boiler and that's why i also have a heat safe bowl here because sometimes you might just put some simmering water in that pot and put a bowl on top this is great for melting things like chocolate that you might be using either as a base of a frosting or as an addition to a frosting of course i've got my handy stand mixer here a lot of frostings are really great to make in the stand mixer or of course you can use an electric hand mixer as well i like the stand mixer because of course the different attachments so depending on the recipe that i'm using i might use the paddle attachment or i might use the whisk attachment or i might even use both the whisk attachment of course aerates things and can make them really light and fluffy the paddle attachment can kind of knock some of that air out and smooth things out so sometimes if i'm noticing that my frosting even if i did mix it with the whisk i might switch to the paddle by the end of the process to kind of get that exact texture that i'm looking for a few other things you're going to need some recipes are going to require very specific temperature so i have my thermometer here this kind is actually the kind i prefer over the standard candy thermometer this is an electric thermometer an electric probe thermometer with a long kind of wire you can set this part off to the side of your stove and allow this part to sit in this is what we use when i was in pastry school because it works great as a thermometer for multiple kinds of kitchen tasks but also works great in baking and things like cooking sugar getting it to the right consistency the right temperature making sure our eggs are properly cooked if need be i've also got of course some of the things that you can use for finishing we've got our spatulas our offset spatulas which we can use for spreading and frosting i also have piping bags and piping tips of course frosting and fillings are great for piping and the thicker the frosting the more it's going to hold the consistency of a shape from your piping tip what else do i have here oh i forgot this this is such a silly little tool but i have to give it a moment because it's one of my most used kitchen tools this is a potato masher is how this is sold but this is not a great potato masher this style of potato masher in my opinion doesn't do a great job of mashing potatoes but it does a wonderful job of mashing fruit and i use a lot of fresh fruit in my frostings and fillings icings glazes all of those things so i like to have one of these on hand when i'm cooking fruit to help mash it a little bit help release some of the juices while i'm cooking it and just make sure that i'm really kind of getting the most and maximizing that fruit so it needs its own little moment i think that's pretty much it that's one of the beautiful things about frosting one of the most common questions i get asked of course is are there any that i can make without a mixer at all and there are definitely some recipes in this particular episode that you can make with just a bowl and a spatula or a bowl and a whisk but then there's other recipes like the meringue based recipes that while technically you can make them by hand they would really tire your arm out so when a recipe suggests using the mixer i say opt for it but i've included some recipes that definitely can just be mixed by hand as well keep your equipment kind of minimal and really what this is about is getting to experiment with different flavors and also learning to nail all the consistencies and the textures to get that just right effect i'm calling this episode frostings icings and glazes and that's because in my mind these terms sort of encompass those finishing elements those sweet finishing elements that we use on things like cakes cookies all sorts of stuff that said what these different terms mean is sort of arguable like definitely people will sometimes use the word icing to refer to something i would call a frosting and that's okay here's how i break it down for reference a frosting is the thickest it can be piped or spreadable and it's usually got kind of like a fluffy consistency of course the consistency can vary and be a bit smoother but it's definitely the thickest of the three icing is typically a little bit thinner though there are also thicker icings too think about like a thin royal icing that you might use on a cookie versus a thicker icing that you might spread on top of warm cinnamon buns but they can still be piped or spread and they can while they are thinner or thicker depending on the recipe that you're using them for they are typically smoother than frostings and less fluffy finally we've got glazes these can range on the thicker side and be very thickly drizzleable but typically they're very thin they can even be so thin that they can be poured or items can be dipped or dunked into the glaze so it's definitely the smoothest and most liquid of the three now let's go back to that first category the thickest frostings there are so many different types of frostings like honestly way too many for even this episode but i'm going to talk about a lot of them i want to talk about all the different kinds and really break them down because sometimes the consistency or the look that you're wanting on your finished baked good it might actually behoove you to choose a different type of frosting than the one you're thinking of certain looks kind of naturally work better with certain kinds of frostings than others so let's break them down one by one [Music] the first category of frostings we're going to talk about are buttercreams there are a lot of buttercreams and they all have kind of these qualifying names of something buttercream sometimes those qualifying names come from the ingredients that are sort of the base of the buttercream so for example italian meringue plus butter equals italian buttercream swiss meringue plus butter equals swiss buttercream other ones have their names you know based kind of on the ingredients that are inside and the consistency and texture that they have the first one we're going to make is the easiest it's called american buttercream american buttercream is as simple as it gets in the frosting world it's just butter combined with confectioners sugar of course the butter could also be another fat sometimes in grocery stores or you know big production bakeries they use a combination of shortening and butter to make it a little bit fluffier but of course butter is what tastes best so we're going to mix the butter and the powdered sugar to combine basically creaming it to make a light fluffy consistency the pros of this frosting are that it is very easy the cons are that it's very sweet because there's no other ingredients really to help balance and the powdered sugar is really what's kind of bringing it to that thick consistency so i do also add typically some flavoring agents extract and sometimes a little bit of cream or milk to help loosen the consistency of this icing as it sets american buttercream will form a little bit of a skin on the surface so it's really great when you need kind of a little bit of icing like in between layers of cakes or it's great on top of cupcakes anywhere where you want like a nice punch of a very sweet icing so we'll start by adding two sticks of unsalted butter room temperature butter we've got the paddle attachment in here and let's start by mixing the butter with the paddle attachment on medium to medium-low speed speed just to kind of soften that butter even though it's been at room temperature we want to sort of start to loosen it up before we add any other ingredients help get it really nice and smooth and also helps with that fluffy texture we're trying to achieve once we've mixed that butter for a few moments we can start adding our powdered sugar gradually the main reason we want to add it gradually is we just don't want a sugar shower we want to just add a little bit let it kind of get absorbed or combined though there is another thing we can do why don't we do this and show everyone sometimes you can actually just kind of put a towel over it and then even if it does puff up it's kind of contained by the towel you can do that every time you add an addition anytime you're adding a lot of flour or other dry ingredients to something okay we got that first amount in let's add some more i'm using unsalted butter in this particular buttercream but you can always use salted butter in most buttercream recipes just remember that if the recipe calls for additional salt you might want to leave it out otherwise you could end up with a buttercream that's too salty and not sweet enough once you get your butter and powdered sugar combined the mixture should be nice and light and fluffy the only thing we need to do now is kind of add any flavoring that we need to add and also adjust the consistency so first i'm going to add with the mixer running i'm just going to add my vanilla extract i'm also going to add some fine sea salt because again i used unsalted butter we'll mix those to combine now the last thing that i like to add is a little bit of milk or cream not every american buttercream recipe has this but i like to add milk or cream because it helps thin out the consistency a little bit and also helps combat some of the sweetness in order to get this frosting to not just taste like whipped butter we have to add a pretty good amount of sugar and that sugar because it is confectioners sugar can also be quite thick it really makes a very thick frosting so adding a little bit of extra fat a little bit of extra dairy and liquid really really helps this frosting in my opinion and you can really add as much as you want to achieve your desired consistency just remember at a certain point too much liquid is going to make this very runny and not like a frosting anymore i usually stick right around a quarter cup okay let me give this a scrape and one more mix with this particular style of buttercream there's really no worry about over mixing aside from the fact that eventually you'll keep incorporating air into it whenever you're mixing something especially in an electric mixer every rotation is incorporating a little bit of air that really isn't a problem when we're trying to maintain a really fluffy icing but at a certain point it could have a lot of more air in it than you really wanted and basically the only negative about that is that it's going to look less smooth when we spread it onto the cake but you're not really going to mess this frosting up it's pretty foolproof once you get everything combined and you've got that fluffy consistency that you're looking for it's done that's how easy american buttercream is that's one of the reasons why it's so popular because it comes together really easily and it's just simple to do if for some reason you get it at this stage and you don't feel like it's soft enough just remember at any stage you can adjust the consistency with a little bit more dairy i'm just gonna put this into a bowl for when we show you the consistency of it why am i turning around let me bring that bowl up here like you don't get to see this part [Music] that is buttery sugar so with american buttercream there's sort of two other frostings that are made in a very similar way kind of that same method of just sort of mixing the ingredients to combine until you get the desired consistency so we've got our american buttercream which is this one right here as you can see it's a little bit more yellow than the other two frostings and that's just because of the quantity of butter to powdered sugar ratio you know the base of american buttercream is butter which is yellow so it has a little bit more of a natural yellow hue two other frostings that i consider kind of to be in that category are cream cheese frosting everybody loves a good cream cheese frosting and also what i call sweetened condensed milk frosting for lack of a better term i'm not sure if it has a formal name sweetened condensed milk frosting or sweetened condensed milk buttercream is made by adding sweetened condensed milk to whipped butter you whip the butter a little bit first then you add the sweetened condensed milk to it this makes such an incredibly delicious smooth custardy frosting that's just as easy to make as american buttercream but isn't as sweet as american buttercream and also because it has a little bit of that milk in it it does have a lighter color and is a little bit easier to dye and tint if you want to so let's see all three of these spread onto some cakes you can kind of see the textures the you know the pros and cons i'll start up here with the american buttercream the biggest thing to note about american buttercream is it's really thick so when you're spreading it onto things it can actually sometimes be a little bit difficult to spread without kind of giving your spatula a few turns of it first and and that's because of the powdered sugar the powdered sugar is sort of creating a skin on this frosting that will allow it to set up eventually but it's going to start doing that as soon as you don't touch it for a little while so it's very fluffy very thick very aerated it's a dream frosting to work with in terms of its ease it's just important to remember that because it's so thick when you pipe it it might break off of the piping tip rather than creating a beautiful curly q like some of the italian and swiss meringue buttercreams okay here we've got our cream cheese frosting now cream cheese frosting is always going to be softer than american buttercream because it has both butter and cream cheese in it and the cream cheese the way the fat the just the consistency of it is softer than butter even when it's firm so it's important to remember that it is always going to be a little bit softer if you desire a thicker cream cheese frosting really what you want to do is just add more powdered sugar to it till you get that consistency that you want personally the softness of the cream cheese frosting is one of the things i'm typically using it for i love cream cheese filling as the center of a sandwich cookie you know things like that where that softness can kind of be especially enjoyable so that's our cream cheese frosting the final one we've got here is the sweetened condensed milk frosting which to me just has this like consistency very similar to the italian buttercream and the more stable buttercreams that i love that are made with meringue but it's as easy to make as american buttercream this is one of those ones that i'm hoping in this episode and people are gonna be like wow i didn't know that was a thing because it's really so easy to make and for people who think that american buttercream is just too sweet i think this is the way you're going to want to go next try this so easy so smooth and you can see the color of it right next to the american buttercream how much brighter and whiter it is next to that american buttercream really is a great frosting for all sorts of tasks [Applause] the next buttercream i want to talk about is italian buttercream the reason i want to talk about italian buttercream is because it's my most used buttercream it's the most used because i happen to really like this process i think that it's one of the easiest most consistent while the sugar is cooking the egg whites are whipping and you can be scaling out some of your ingredients it's just the rhythm of this is my favorite but that said there's really no difference between italian buttercream and swiss buttercream except for the type of meringue that you're using so sometimes people who prefer swiss meringue prefer swiss buttercream so there's really not one right one or one right way but let's talk about these meringue based buttercreams and how to get them just right of course we talk about meringue in great detail in our meringue episode bake it up a notch so check that out and we're going to jump back in when we get our meringue to the right spot to add our butter and make it a buttercream [Applause] when you're making an italian meringue you want to start whipping your egg whites with the cream of tartar in it when your sugar mixture is getting close to the final temperature which eventually we're going to want it at 240 degrees so when it gets around 230 235 start whipping your egg whites the goal is for them to be at soft peaks by the time our syrup is ready to pour in once our syrup is at the right temperature we're ready to add it to the egg whites of course this is also making the egg whites safe to eat by helping to cook them sort of in the mixer to the right temperature [Music] when you're making a meringue based buttercream you want to make sure that your meringue has reached full volume but also that it has had the chance to cool completely if we try adding room temperature butter to a warm meringue base it's just going to melt the butter and we're not going to end up with a thick smooth buttercream instead we're going to end up with like a soupy kind of soft mixture that we don't want so what we're going to do is now that the bowl feels warm to the touch i'm sorry it doesn't feel warm to the touch that's what i just said don't add it to the warm meringue we want the bowl to feel just barely warm or kind of room temperature to the touch we want to make sure we're using room temperature butter as well so we're going to just keep whipping and we're going to add the butter a tablespoon or two at a time it's a lot of butter to incorporate and by adding it slowly we give it the best chance of mixing in and blending and really smooth rather than if we try to add it all in at once that's when you sometimes also get clumps of butter that just don't want to incorporate this gradual technique really produces the smoothest creamiest results all right when you get to the very end and you're adding we've only got a couple tablespoons left to go your buttercream should be nice and smooth and fluffy one of the things that i do always like to point out is that as you start to add the butter the meringue is going to deflate a little bit that's okay we're adding a fat to something that's really light and airy some deflation is good we just want to make sure we're adding it gradually enough that we don't deflate it too much all at once and we maintain some of that light smooth consistency once the last of the butter is incorporated make sure it really has a chance to mix in smoothly then we're just going to add our last couple of ingredients which are flavoring ingredients we've got vanilla extract we also have a little bit of salt [Music] okay i think we're there super thick super light and fluffy one of the other advantages of meringue style buttercreams they require a little more work because you have to make the meringue of your choice but they're really really bright white so that's one of the other big pros about them is that you can dye them different colors really easily and they're just really wonderful for cake decorating layer cakes but also to use as the filling inside things like sandwich cookies there's a lot of possibilities with a meringue based buttercream in pastry school sometimes after we got all of the meringue buttercream combined we would switch to the paddle attachment i mentioned that in the beginning portion of the video with the equipment and this can just help to make it a little bit smoother and less aerated it's totally a personal preference i don't usually find that i need to do that but i know if people are looking for a really smooth look with a buttercream like this knocking out some of the air is a surefire way to do that all right so this is our beautiful bright white silky smooth nice and thick and in my opinion not too sweet italian buttercream and making swiss buttercream looks a lot like this there are some other kinds that have a similar process to this too but let's dive into one of the others that's completely different hermine buttercream [Music] the next style of frosting we're going to talk about is hermine buttercream which i've actually also heard called or have called in the past pudding style buttercream though ermine is its proper name an hermine style buttercream starts by cooking a mixture of sugar dairy and a thickener a starch of some sort flour or sometimes i guess it could be corn starch etc we're going to cook those ingredients on the stovetop to make kind of a thick pudding like mixture let it cool then we'll whip butter into that to create an incredibly delicious buttercream i'm going to start by adding my dry ingredients into my pot first i've got sugar also going to add my flour this is all-purpose flour and this is a chocolate hermine buttercream so i've got cocoa powder and this is really one of my favorite things about this style of buttercream is it's really easy to flavor with other things so in this case obviously i'm just adding some cocoa powder to it but because you're kind of cooking it as a pudding it makes it really easy to potentially add other flavors into that pudding by infusing it with things like citrus zest vanilla bean so on and so forth final thing i'm going to add is a little bit of salt just going to whisk those ingredients to combine then we're going to add our milk to that [Music] and i start by whisking this mixture but eventually we're going to want to switch to a silicone spatula so i have one right near me in handy because as the mixture starts to thicken it makes it easier to kind of get into the edges and corners of the pot if we've got something like that spat to help us scrape our way through all right really work with the whisk make sure you get all those lumps out the cocoa powder likes to lump up sometimes the flour likes to lump up but if you mix everything together first the granules of the sugar help to disperse that starch that you don't get any big clumps and they can help with the cocoa powder too all right so we're just going to keep cooking this sort of over a medium heat stirring constantly until the mixture starts to thicken and once it thickens to that pudding like consistency it really should just take a couple of minutes we want it to cool completely before we start mixing it to make our butter cream i love this style of buttercream because it isn't too sweet this is one of the ones that i think universally gets a lot of love when people figure out what it is because it's just really um not necessarily much more difficult to make but really really really delicious and because it has that base of dairy not just butter and sugar that dairy base really helps to keep it kind of that perfect level of sweet in my opinion all right we know it's ready when it's at kind of this thick pudding-like consistency and you should actually also see some bubbles break the surface which yes i'm seeing some all over here all right we're just going to pour this onto a container into a container to cool completely i'm doing it into a quarter sized baking sheet or 9x13 pan the increased surface area is going to help it cool a lot faster so that we can get to making our frosting a lot quicker and the only other thing you want to remember is like any mixture that's thickened with starch you want to cover it directly with plastic wrap or it can form a skin on the surface that can make your eventual buttercream less smooth so we'll cover that let it cool down and then we're ready to whip it into a buttercream [Music] fun fact but i actually almost only wear dresses i hate pants all right once our pudding base has gotten nice and cooled to room temperature ideally or lightly chilled is okay but as close to room temperature as possible is best we're gonna go ahead and start mixing the actual buttercream so to start this i've got the whip attachment on i'm gonna add my butter go ahead and cut it into some pieces i don't know why i'm trying to add big sticks of butter in there so we've got a pound of butter here just like any other day starting off with a pound of butter and we're going to whip that until it gets a little bit aerated whipping this butter is not only going to make it a uniform consistency it's also going to make it easier to add our pudding base to it we don't need to whip it for too long two to three minutes just to give it a little bit of aeration and get it to a uniform consistency i think that's looking pretty good we're going to go ahead and start adding our pudding mixture which has gotten really nice and thick now so thick that i have to scrape some of it off the plastic you've heard me say it before and i'll say it again scrape like it's your christmas bonus or in this case squeeze all right i'm gonna add this in a few additions just to help make it easier to incorporate we'll start by adding just about a third of the mixture and then whipping it into the butter you can start in kind of low speed to start getting the two combined and then we're going to go ahead and raise it up to about medium [Applause] alright i'm going to go ahead and add the rest of my pudding what did some spill that'll be a good behind the scenes all right [Music] i think we're there oh yes so thick smooth creamy it's a beautiful frosting and it's got this natural thickness from that pudding base that we started with but there's just one more thing we've got to do which is add some vanilla extract flavoring ingredients like extracts can actually lose some of their potency if you add them too early in a cooking process anytime you're cooking something on the stovetop some of that aroma that essence can kind of be cooked out so we didn't add it in the pudding stage instead we're going to add it here at the end of mixing you could add it to the pudding you would just want to make sure you added it after the pudding had already come off the heat of the stove [Music] perfect yes so thick so creamy that's an ermine buttercream [Music] i showed you how to make the italian buttercream and some of these other buttercreams to me sort of fall in that same category because they involve some kind of advanced preparation and cooking of eggs or some kind of custard even before making your actual frosting so with italian buttercream we make an italian meringue then add butter this right here is a swiss buttercream and the swiss buttercream of course we make a swiss meringue and then add butter we have our ermine which is the pudding base which butter is whipped into and similar to that is german butter german buttercream starts with pastry cream as the base a common custard used throughout the pastry world and then we whip butter into that to make this really delicious custardy just such a good frosting in fact i've posted about this frosting quite a bit german buttercream on my instagram and people are always asking about it so if you're looking for an especially creamy buttercream german buttercream is also one of my favorites and then this bright yellow one over here that you see is actually french buttercream just to be clear french buttercream is not a french meringue with butter mixed in instead it is a mixture that uses egg yolks or whole eggs sometimes it's a mixture of the two even so it can be egg yolks whole eggs or a blend of them and mixes that with sugar the same way when you would make a swiss buttercream but instead you're using these whole eggs that base is called a pata bomb pat a bomb with an e at the end the pata bomb is then whipped to full volume but a pata bomb of a whole egg whipped mixture doesn't get the same kind of volume that a meringue does egg whites can increase up to eight times their original volume whereas whole eggs will only increase about four times to their original volume it still gets really nice and thick and ribbony then we add butter to that and that's why this frosting is so yellow not only from the butter but from the egg yolks themselves so i'll start with the italian buttercream because it is the one that i use the most often but you're going to see that it and the swiss are very very similar looking when you put them both on the cake oh yes so fluffy so smooth nice and bright white okay now i've got the swiss and the swiss buttercream was made yesterday and we reconstituted it something that we're going to talk about a little bit later in this episode and so when you reconstitute it it can actually make the consistency smoother because we warm it up we apply some heat to it so i'm looking at this swiss buttercream and even though it should look identical to the italian and it looks pretty close because we just reconstituted it it's actually looking a little bit smoother so we'll talk about that and the consistency of your buttercreams a little bit more after we go over all these different types okay that's looking beautiful all right so next up let's do right next to that the german just since it's kind of in the same vein and you are gonna see that the german gosh it is spreading on like a dream i'm sorry i'm just getting really excited because it's so it's like so beautiful so the one thing you can see when you put them next to each other i'm looking yeah you can definitely see it it's slightly more yellow slightly less white i mean hardly noticeable but that's because pastry cream does use whole eggs to thicken it and so we do have a little bit more of a natural kind of creamy yellow color to this but nothing like this last one here well it's not the last one but the last of this row the french now french buttercream because it has so much fat is very soft very smooth very silky very rich and it's just truly so delicious whenever i make this sometimes i use this as a filling for donuts and things too when i want something to just be like really over the top and everyone goes oh what is that filling it's french buttercream oh beautiful so you can see it's really really smooth it's a lot softer when you're applying it to a layer cake it can actually benefit you to have french buttercream a little bit lightly just very lightly chilled to help make it easier to to frost or be putting your cake or your pastry whatever you're putting it on into the fridge for intermittent chill times to help it firm back up because the butter that's in there is going to firm up every time you chill it it's just the the egg mixture that's going to keep it nice and soft and silky all right our last one is the hermine buttercream which of course also has chocolate in it because we flavored it so it looks pretty different than these other two but mostly i want to notice the texture and how aerated and light and super fluffy it is and remember you can beat out some of those air bubbles if you want using the paddle attachment and by applying a little bit of heat again we'll talk about some of that later but i quite like the natural airiness of this frosting when i use it beautiful so these are our different kinds of slightly more complicated buttercreams buttercreams that require some kind of advanced preparation we've got our meringue buttercreams italian and swiss we've got our hermine and german buttercreams that start with kind of a pudding base and then we have our french buttercream that uses whole eggs to whip up or egg yolks instead of just egg whites in the meringue style and wow we have a lot of different yummy buttercreams here these buttercreams are all thick creamy all good for use in things like layer cakes they'll all work with methods like spreading and piping both but remember the consistency that the buttercream is is going to determine how you're able to use it in your desired pastry [Music] the next category of frostings is meringue based frostings now wait erin you were just talking about meringue buttercreams well buttercream of course has the addition of butter but you can actually use a meringue as a frosting all on its own these make a really light fluffy airy just delightfully sweet frostings and they're really delicious the most commonly known is called seven minute frosting which is basically just swiss meringue you cook the sugar and the egg whites over the stove until the sugar is dissolved and the eggs have reached a safe temperature then you whip it to a beautiful fluffy meringue this can go right on a layer cake right on top of cupcakes it's really a great way to finish a lot of different pastries but remember it's not as great for using in layer cakes because it isn't as strong and sturdy when you put it in the fridge it's not going to firm up the way a buttercream does so for the inside of the layers you might want to opt for something else and stick with that seven minute frosting or meringue on the outside just like meringue 7 minute frosting can be toasted or not i typically like to use my kitchen torch to toast it as you know can't stop won't stop lighting things on fire okay and then the other style of frosting that caul kind of falls into this category of meringues is marshmallow frosting i have a little bit of an issue with this phrase marshmallow frosting because actual marshmallow in confectionary is cooking sugar to a specific temperature and then whipping it you're actually whipping and aerating the sugar itself and setting it with gelatin that's what gives it the chewy texture but marshmallow frostings are typically made with egg whites in the style of meringue the main difference is they might have a higher ratio of sugar than a meringue frosting will to kind of make it a little bit more like a classic marshmallow but the egg whites are used typically just to provide a little bit of stability in the style of a frosting when you look at a marshmallow frosting in a meringue frosting they look very similar but again the marshmallow style frosting might be a little bit sweeter might have a more distinctive flavoring and it might not always be toasted but neither can the meringue so they're both very flexible bright white so many possibilities to do with it they look great piped and they definitely look great toasted too let's talk about chocolate frostings i sort of put most chocolate frostings into a category of their own though of course you can always add melted chocolate or cocoa powder to other style of frostings like buttercream whipped cream etc but i keep chocolate itself as its own sort of category especially when chocolate is the overwhelming base of the frosting itself and the most common frosting or frostings that you can make with chocolate that are known are ganache and ganache based frostings so um ganache of course is just chocolate and it can be any kind of chocolate dark milk white that's drowned in boiling cream and the cream sort of helps to melt the chocolate and the whole mixture comes together to be this incredibly beautiful smooth silky filling frosting it can be so many things the main reason i put chocolate into a category of its own is because it behaves really differently than the base of other frostings things like eggs and butter chocolate is going to firm up a lot as it continues to cool and set so frostings have to be formulated to make sure that they're going to allow for them to be fluid at one stage and just remember they are going to set firmer with time if you put it in the fridge it's going to firm up really really fast so just remember you want to keep things at the right temperature and follow the visual cues of the recipes you're using a lot of times recipes will include things like telling you that the chocolate needs to be warm when it's added to something or the chocolate needs to cool to room temperature or the mixture needs to cool a bit oh my cream is getting ready to boil here it's really important to pay attention to all of those things because they are going to impact the final consistency of the chocolate frosting all right my cream is hot i'm going to go ahead and pour it into or over my chocolate there are different ratios of ganache depending on what you're using it for so some ganache recipes are going to be really firm because you're using them in candy making or to make things like truffles then other times ganache is going to be really thin because you might be using it as almost a glaze and you want it to pour over something and then other times it's more of a medium consistency and it all just depends on what kind of chocolate you're using dark chocolate is going to be firmer than chocolates that have higher amounts of sugar and dairy in them like milk and white chocolate and how much cream you're using if you are using the same amount of chocolate as you up the cream it's going to be thinner and looser and delightful so once i poured the cream over this chocolate i let it set for like a good 15 20 really how long have i been talking probably closer to a minute and a half but we want to let it sit here that starts to melt the chocolate and starts to allow the mixture to come together then one of my instructors in pastry school chef peter grueling taught me this that you start by mixing in the very center in kind of small circles it's a really lovely food moment because when it starts it kind of looks like chunky milk at first it doesn't look necessarily good at all and then as you start to see the mixture come together in the center of the bowl you can widen your circles to incorporate all of the chocolate so see it's starting to happen so once we start to see a darker chocolate in the center that's the point at which we can widen our stirring a little bit and this technique just helps to bring the ganache together you're making kind of an emulsion so it helps to really bring the ganache together in the best way that's best for the chocolate because chocolate is so delicious but really has a mind of its own so see this is a good demonstrator of what i was saying how it comes together kind of in one spot and the rest still sort of looks like chocolate milk and then as we go oh this is just one of my favorite food moments because then the whole thing starts to look beautiful then we can just start widening those circles to make sure that everything is incorporated and the result should be really shiny really smooth and nicely thick oh yes so while this ganache is warm it's going to be really really soft as it cools it's going to become a more spreadable consistency so this is the most important thing to remember with chocolate frosting i have a couple of recipes for chocolate frostings that include chocolate and some other kind of ingredient like this ganache and um people often write in the comments like that it was impossible to spread that frosting but most likely that frosting then just cooled too much remember the chocolate is going to continue to firm up as it cools so you really want to pay attention to the recipe and at what kind of level of fluidity and what texture it should be to use this ganache you could kind of let it cool till it's spreadable consistency as i said or you can let it cool to room temperature and then it's ready to be whipped whipped ganache is one of my favorite frosting alternatives because it's just ganache but it has that light airy texture of something like a buttercream but it's just got all those beautiful bitter notes all those chocolaty notes it's just to die for i love it love it love it so that's what we're going to do with this i have some ganache that's already been cooling to room temperature we're going to whip that up but first i want to talk about the last style of the chocolate frosting which i call simply just chocolate plus because chocolate has this miraculous ability to firm things up it can really be used in conjunction with just one or two other simple ingredients to make a very delicious frosting one of my favorites is a delicious vegan frosting that's on food 52 and it blends melted chocolate and mashed sweet potato or butternut squash to create this incredibly smooth creamy thick frosting that tastes super chocolatey but actually is sneaking a little bit of vegetable in there too which is super smart and cool one of my favorites is to mix sour cream into chocolate you take freshly melted chocolate add some sour cream to it i have this in a recipe for my milk chocolate caramel crunch cake on food 52 it has a milk chocolate cream cheese frosting no a milk chocolate sour cream frosting you just mix the sour cream and the chocolate together to make a smooth frosting the cool temperature of the sour cream starts to firm up the chocolate immediately making it a beautiful spreadable consistency so when you're talking about the world of chocolate just remember temperature is key the type of chocolate you're using matters and you're always going to want to make sure that you're paying attention to what temperature and consistency you're going to want it to be at the end so you don't let your chocolate cool too far or try to use it when it's too warm now let's whip that ganache the consistency of the chocolate is super important we've let this ganache cool to room temperature which means that it's beautifully thick and it can kind of hold a line when i draw my spatula through it still flowy and fluid as you can see when i stop there's still a little bit of motion but this is the right consistency because we don't want it to get too firm or it's not going to whip up to that consistency that we want so i'm just going to go ahead again i put this onto a baking sheet like this you do not need to do that it can be cooled in any kind of container i just do that to help it cool faster because there's increased surface area [Music] all right i've got my ganache in my mixer bowl and i'm going to attach the whisk attachment or the whip attachment we're going to start whipping this ganache on kind of a medium speed and what you're going to see is it's going to lighten in color it's going to look instead of looking like dark chocolate it might look a little bit more like milk chocolate and once it lightens a hue or two that's a pretty good sign that it's ready to go if you keep whipping it it is going to get very aerated and it can get kind of stiff so you want it to stay kind of a smooth consistency like a frosting [Music] when it starts to hold kind of marks from the whisk in the frosting and you can kind of see where the whip just was that's a good indicator that it's ready so thick so smooth because it's chocolate it's soft so that's whipped ganache okay i'm gonna give this a scrape because some of the darker chocolate actually you can totally see it right here it didn't incorporate so we just want to make sure everything's a uniform consistency so we'll just scrape down to the bottom give it a few folds and then we can plop this on a cake and show the consistency of what this looks like all right let's put it onto our little sheet cake here and see its consistency really really smooth thick and spreadable beautiful to pipe and again if you are desiring an even silkier texture less aerated just don't whip it quite as far keep it a little bit more ganashi is ganashi a word don't think it is but you could make it a thing ganashi all right wow that looks so good this is the first one of these cakes where i just want to be like all right so this is our whipped ganache and we've got all these chocolate style frosting so remember the main takeaways from the chocolate style frostings temperature is everything i already gave these bullet points i think we're good to go so it's whipped cream time it's whipped cream o'clock i'm so excited let's do whipped cream let's talk about whipped cream it's one of my favorite things in the world and one of the reasons it's my favorite is because it's so versatile you've already seen me on bake it up a notch use it to make things like custards and to thicken pie fillings and of course to decorate the tops of pies and all sorts of things but whipped cream really is a delicious simple frosting all on its own think about strawberry shortcake while we don't necessarily think of the whipped cream in that as frosting that is what it is you know we're putting something on that our little cake to enjoy it and make it even sweeter and more delicious so i want to talk about a few different things with whipped cream because the first thing is while whipped cream is delicious and simple to make it doesn't hold very well so it's not necessarily a great make ahead option which is one of the reasons i think sometimes people don't use it on things like cakes i love a whipped cream frosting on top of something like a sheet cake it's really simple but you do kind of need to make that then right before you're ready to serve it won't always hold as well it can deflate with time and it can also start to kind of weep or separate the first thing i want to talk about is how you can kind of get whipped cream as far as possible ahead of time because i don't think a lot of people know this it's possible to whip cream but under whip it kind of just under what you would call soft peaks and then it will hold that way in the refrigerator for some time and you just need to give it a few swipes of your whisk and it's going to be thicker and ready to go so in my bowl i have some cream that i started whipping a little bit earlier and as you can see it's still very thin like but it's thicker than cream on its own would be it's clearly been whipped so i'm going to go ahead and finish whipping it yeah see we're already there so then it doesn't take very long at all to get your whipped cream to like the desired peaks that you want it and that's the first thing i want to talk about is kind of that advanced preparation of whipped cream and how that's really important but the next thing i want to talk about is stabilizing whipped cream because if you can't really make it ahead i know the next question is is it possible to ever make it ahead and yes there are some ways that you can make a whipped cream that is a little bit more stable and sturdy the most common and also my least favorite is gelatin gelatin can be added it can be bloomed melted and added to whipped cream and then as the whipped cream sets and stays cool the gelatin is going to help keep the structure of the whipped cream i don't really like this because i think it's kind of a hassle if you don't do it quite right you can taste the gelatin a little bit and it also means that it's no longer vegetarian since gelatin isn't a vegetarian friendly product and a lot of people who like whipped cream you know might be vegetarians we want to make sure that we can make a whipped cream that'll satisfy everyone so here are some things that i use that make a naturally stable whipped cream and they make it stable in different ways the first is by using cream cheese in the whipped cream i use this in my recipe that's on food 52 it's a genius recipe for my strawberry not so short cake that starts by creaming a little bit of cream cheese with powdered sugar then you add cream and whip it the cultures in the cream cheese help to thicken the mixture so it's an extra thick extra sturdy whipped cream and it can hold great in the refrigerator even on a baked good for several hours and it's really really lovely another thing that you can use to naturally stabilize are things like nut butters nut butters the protein in it they also make a really delicious addition to the whipped cream but they will make it a little bit thicker and more mousse like while it won't entirely stabilize the whipped cream because it is also additional fat it will make it thicker and it will definitely make it hold a little bit longer so if you wanted to frost something with a pistachio whipped cream or a hazelnut whipped cream or a peanut butter whipped cream before your party and hold it in the fridge it would probably survive with that one additional loan the final one that you can add is freeze-dried fruit or freeze-dried fruit powder this is something that really naturally stabilizes it it makes it really really thick and because those ingredients are so dry and they're fibrous they really thicken the mixture while keeping it light and airy and it will stay stable in the refrigerator for quite a while so those are some ways that you can stabilize the whipped cream that also adds some delicious flavor and even maybe some delicious color to your whipped cream which i also love the other thing that you can do with whipped cream and i swear this is the last thing i said only five minutes the other thing that you can do with whipped cream is flavor it you can add melted chocolate in at the end of the process or you can fold in things like homemade fruit purees or jams curds all sorts of things like that which will add delicious flavor and also color to your whipped cream so i'm going to do that now i'm going to add some raspberry jam to my whipped cream and the first thing to note is that i only whipped my cream to soft peaks see how it fell right off my spatula because as i mix the jam in it's going to continue to mix and whip the cream and i don't want to end up with too stiff and sturdy of cream the other thing to remember is that if you're adding an ingredient like i'm adding this jam that is sweet you're going to want to make sure that you compensate by not sweetening the whipped cream itself too much so the final whipped cream with jam in it is sweetened it's lightly pink and it's got really juicy wonderful fruit flavor this is just one of the ways that you can flavor your whipped cream of course you can use things like spices citrus zest extracts a little bit of booze of your choice tons of options and this is always going to be a crowd-pleasing frosting so let's see what they look like spread onto some cakes before i put some of these on cakes there are two things about whipped cream i forgot to say before that are really important the first is one of the other ingredients that i personally love to add to my whipped cream to add additional flavors a little bit of thickness extra creaminess is other dairy products things like mascarpone cheese i mentioned cream cheese already but also ricotta is really delicious these add a different character a different texture and some different flavor notes and also just make it really really creamy and delicious so it's one of the things i do most i actually have some mascarpone whipped cream here and we'll show the beautiful consistency of it on some cake the other thing i wanted to remind everyone because i talked about how you can under whip the cream to be able to make it faster at the last minute the other thing is if you've ever over whipped cream by just a little bit and it's no longer smooth and beautiful instead it's kind of clumpy if you actually add a little more fresh cream to it from the fridge cold cream and just gently stir or fold it in you can actually save over whipped cream so that's a good little tip just add a little bit more cream to it when in doubt add more cream so that's the perfect thing to do all right let's see the texture of some of these whipped creams on cake the first one i've got is my jammy whipped cream which i kept kind of soft but also it's soft because of that jam that we added which is going to make it you know a little bit extra sweet uh that's why we love a whipped cream frosting though because it just does not get any smoother creamier more delicious yes love that but now let's look at it side by side with this is the mascarpone cream you can already see by the way i plop it down that it is thicker and i just love the way that that cheese it not only adds of course the literal thickness but the mouthfeel suddenly becomes just incredibly creamy it's just so so good like the best whipped cream you've ever had and then finally we've got the peanut butter whipped cream and you can see it is really thick it actually inconsistency reminds me a little bit more of like cream cheese frosting or or the sweetened condensed milk buttercream it's really thick and that nut butter just does an incredible job of like naturally thickening oh my gosh and it smells so peanut buttery this peanut butter whipped cream you can make just that and put it into a pie crust and it's the best pie filling you've ever had it is so so so good so we've got all of these whipped cream side by side you can see a little bit of difference in the softness but they've all got the same thing they've got that whipped cream delicious fluffy light airiness and it makes for a great simple frosting let's talk about what the ideal consistency for certain baking tasks is of course every frosting you really want it to be smooth you definitely want been using the word creamy a lot i feel and that smoothness is definitely what we're looking for but one thing i want to point out is that when you're working with the frosting it should also be thick it should be spreadable it should be something that will hold a shape when piped if it's really runny or drippy or thin it might have gotten too warm it might not have been whipped sufficiently so make sure you're looking for a nice thick frosting first and foremost when you're working with one of the classic frosting combos for piping a firmer consistency is often desired especially when you want it to hold a specific shape if it's too firm it can also really hurt your hand to pipe you can be squeezing and squeezing and squeezing and not much is coming out of the tip also remember that as you pipe the warmth of your hand is going to continue to heat the frosting so work minimally apply like just filling the bag as much as you need and then refilling it as needed so that you don't warm up too much of it as you're working a wonderful pastry chef i know named caitlyn freeman once told me that the best consistency for frostings when you're making a smooth frosted cake is mayonnaise consistency this changed my life we talk about it in the layer cake episode but when the frosting is a little bit softer still thick enough to apply with a spatula but a little bit softer it eliminates some of the air bubbles helping to make the frosting super smooth as you apply it i mentioned the temperature mattering with piping but really with all frosting it matters if the frosting is too warm or too cold it might separate or alter the texture we're going to talk about this in the mistakes section but just remember try to keep your frostings at room temperature and nice and spreadable aerated frostings like meringues and whipped cream should be really light and fluffy but totally smooth no clumps allowed and then as i mentioned chocolate frostings are going to get firmer as they cool so make sure that you're keeping an eye on your chocolate and maintaining the ideal consistency in fact let's start with some chocolate frosting this is just some ganache not whipped ganache but ganache that i have cooled to room temperature and it's now a nice spreadable consistency and as it continues to set on the cake it's going to get firmer but it's always going to stay smooth and creamy and you really can't beat a chocolate frosting this is the exact ideal consistency spreadable it's holding its shape but it's also easy to work with not at all too firm okay now let's talk about the other frostings kind of the thicker ones we want that mayonnaisey consistency which which one of those is my mayonnaise and consistency actually let's start with the not mayonnaise consistency to show what i mean by that so this is some italian buttercream that has been sitting at room temperature and for one thing um it's very aerated it maybe needs some of the air knocked out of it but for another because it's been sitting at room temperature it's firmed up a little bit and this is an important thing to show because there's nothing wrong with this texture this is a delicious frosting gonna be really really tasty but it's going to be really difficult for any baker to get that looking totally smooth there are so many air pockets in there all of that kind of so by heating it and getting some of those air pockets out you end up making a super smooth final consistency that's much easier to get to set smooth and specifically when you're spreading it like this you can already see it's easier for me to get it looking like there's almost no line on it because there's just less air it's a it's smoother it's a little bit warmer i've knocked some of the air bubbles out of it so we end up with a much smoother look and of course you can still swoop it like this too which of course always looks delicious but my point is just that that temperature makes the big difference between this kind of airy almost clumpy looking icing and something that definitely is softer as you apply it softer edges and a little bit smoother this is especially important as i said when you want that super straight smooth side effect on a layer cake really important there this is a ganache cooled to the right temperature until it's spreadable and used as a frosting this is italian buttercream that i've let cool so that's one of the reasons why it's so clumpy and this is the swiss buttercream so they normally would look exactly identical and the only difference is i heated this one up so that it's smoother let's talk about piping the first thing i've got in here is some american buttercream in a piping bag and i already mentioned when i was talking about the american buttercream that it's much thicker than a lot of these other ones and while you can still absolutely pipe it as you can see here it's coming out of my piping bag fine but you can see when it breaks away it doesn't break away smooth and this is something that would happen with any firmer icing including one of these other icings that are great for piping but just that has set up to be too cold and too firm in addition i'm actually almost running out of breath talking which that's an exaggeration but it's very difficult to squeeze this pastry bag and i have really strong hands because i pipe a lot and i'm really actually struggling because this is such a thick frosting and that isn't really how piping should be so again nothing wrong with using that frosting to pipe it still works but it might be difficult on your hands the main reason i bring this up is because since american buttercream is the easiest people often make it with kids and then they put it in piping bags or give their kids spatulas to spread the icing and it's actually in some ways one of the more difficult frostings to work with because it's so thick okay then in here i have the peanut butter whipped cream which the main reason i wanted to show that is because it's still really thick and beautiful but it's this really soft texture so i can bring it up for a beautiful little peak if i want there's a lot more options of what i can do with it and it's so much easier on my hands i'm just like squeezing and it's basically coming right out of the pastry bag so it's a lot easier a lot more pleasant to work with none of these consistencies are bad i just think it's worth it to talk about what the ideal consistencies are from the standpoint of if you are somebody who's been tackling a project and you can't get it to look the way that it does in the picture you can't get it to look the way you want it to it might be because of one of these things you might have made the recipe just fine but it might just need a little bit of finessing to get it to that perfect point and the texture and consistency that you want the next category we're going to discuss is icings and glazes and while these are kind of different they have a lot of overlap so i sort of group them together think of an icing as something a little bit thicker like how you might spread icing on top of cinnamon rolls and glaze is something a little bit thinner like how you might glaze donuts that's sort of the idea here let's start with a basic glaze a basic glaze is one of my favorite things to make i make it all the time i make it for so many different things and um i think a lot of times it doesn't get enough credit because you can do a lot and flavor it a lot of ways and there's a lot of cool things you can do with a basic glaze at its most simple basic glaze is confectioner sugar powdered sugar mixed with some kind of liquid to form a smooth drizzleable or spreadable consistency what that liquid is can be just about anything so of course it can be milk one of my favorite things to do with a glaze or icing is actually cream it's the tiniest little change that makes it taste so incredibly rich and delicious sometimes you will even see melted butter being used in an icing or glaze one of my other favorite things to do though is use flavorful liquids so either homemade fruit purees jams fruit juice there's definitely a lot of options and of course those will also give your glazes some really beautiful natural color as well which i really really love the main thing to think of when you're making an icing or a glaze of this nature is what the end result is going to be if you want to fully glaze something you need it to be much thinner versus something that you might be able to pipe or drizzle on that's going to give more of a an opaque kind of coverage remember also that the liquid that you're using is going to impact how much of it you're going to need i have recipes on food 52 for a basic glaze a basic fruity glaze and a basic chocolate glaze all of those recipes work but they all have variable liquid amounts because depending on what you're using it for if you're going to glaze a bundt cake you're going to need a different consistency than if you're going to glaze like again donuts cinnamon rolls um dunk the top of a brioche bun something like that the viscosity of the liquid itself is also going to impact how much of it you're going to need so you might need more cream than you would milk for example and similarly if you're using a fruit puree that you've strained you cook some strawberries and you strain it to get the juice out you might need less of that liquid than you would if you were using whole fruit and some of that fibrousness was in there because that's going to thicken the mixture up as well other than the consistency it's really all about just mixing these ingredients to combine so i'm going to do a basic glaze now with some powdered sugar and milk starting by adding a little bit of milk and then i'm going to show you in my mind the three ideal glaze consistencies remember if you add too much milk you can always add a little bit more confectioners sugar to make it thicker again and if it stays too thick you can always add more milk i knew i wanted this particular glaze to be quite thin so i was pretty generous and i got the exact consistency i want this is the kind of glaze consistency you would use when you want all over coverage something like a donut when you're glazing an entire cake things like that you want it nice and thin like that so that it flows easily and this is a great test does it flow easily off the whisk and yes it does the other indicator is that it really should be pourable you should be able to just transfer it to a liquid measuring cup or something and pour it exactly where you want it and a glaze that's thin enough will do that beautifully so that is the thin consistency when you're working with glazes let's talk about the medium consistency i think this needs a little bit more actually to be the medium consistency and that's the thing as it sits this is going to set up because confectioner's sugar it likes to form that skin so just remember that if you don't keep it covered like i didn't hear on the set of bake it up or not yeah you might need a little bit more okay so here's an example this also flows easily off the spatula but you can see it's flowing in more like clumps it's kind of flowing and breaking away and that's a good indicator of medium thickness that's going to be thick enough that we can pipe it kind of encourage it where we want it to go but it's going to drip slowly this is an ideal consistency when you're doing something like a drip cake and you want to have something that's fluid enough to fall down the sides but also firm enough that it's going to fall slowly and you can have control i have tons more information about these consistencies and how to achieve them in my article on food 52 about drip consistencies and then finally we've got our thicker icing this is still perfect though you could also thin this out a little bit the idea with this is that it should thickly fall off the whisk and in big clumps like that and see how slowly it's moving that's an indicator of a good thick icing this icing is almost more likely to be spread onto something than it is to be piped dunked dipped that sort of thing because it's really more of a frosting like consistency so this is the kind of icing texture that you're looking for when you want to spread something on top of cinnamon rolls or pastries of that nature and you want a nice thick coating maybe even a little bit of texture from a swoop but whatever glaze you decide they're all super easy to make there are so many flavor possibilities and remember at the end of the day it's all about the consistency because i want a nice thick coverage with some beautiful drips on this bundt cake i'm going to use a medium thickness i'm also going to glaze it right on the stand i want to serve it on because that's going to enable me to just let any of the drips fall where they may [Music] the next icing or glaze that i want to talk about is one that i think is highly underutilized and maybe also just misunderstood it's poured fondant now people hear the word fondant and they i think think of that stuff on the outside of wedding cakes that's like edible play-doh and that is one type of fondant but there are many other kinds and this one is very delicious it's a pourable icing very sweet very smooth easy to tint with different colors and it smoothly evenly coats pastries in a similar style to the more widely known i think mirror glaze but it's a lot easier than mirror glaze to make because it doesn't involve any gelatin and because it's using a high quantity of powdered sugar it will still set firm given enough time so i really love poured fondant it's most commonly used for pettiforms which is what i'm going to glaze some with today but you can also use it to glaze a whole cake you can dip cupcakes in it there's really a lot of things that you can do and it's a delicious easy icing just real simple sweet easy to flavor easy to color so many good things about poured fondant the main thing with poured fondant you just mix everything together it's very very simple powdered sugar some corn syrup some water could not be easier to make you mix it together you do need a thermometer because the temperature is key when it comes to poured fondant i've got my little probe thermometer in here now keeping an eye on the temperature if it's too thick this icing isn't going to glaze things uniformly and if it's too hot it could lose its shine and it could also be too thin it could just run right off and not really settle on the baked good so the ideal temperature is around 100 degrees and you just don't want to take it much higher than that it can be reheated over and over again i find somewhere between 90 and 100 is perfect for having a it be fluid enough to easily coat the petit fours but also thick enough that it's a little bit opaque over them once you've got it at the right temperature i like to use a ladle to put it over what i'm doing but you can also pour it from a liquid measuring cup i like the ladle especially when i'm doing an individual pastry because i can kind of move in a circular motion around the item so i can just start pouring down the sides and i've set the items on a rack a cooling rack so that it can catch there's parchment down below to catch any of the excess fondant because again we can scrape that off the clean parchment and use it again and again [Music] so as i'm pouring my poured fondant you know if it gets thicker i'll just reheat it to make it more fluid again and you can also kind of double coat them so if for some reason your consistency is too thin the first time and you feel like you want more it's okay just go ahead double coat them that's fine but you are looking to get even coverage when you're using poured fondant and like i said i just love the advantage of it being so simple and easy to make a little bit easier than mirror glaze which is what we're going to do next [Music] mirror glaze the last in our glazes and icings that we're going to discuss and one of the more complex but really really easy really delicious and really fun the first step is going to be heating kind of our liquid ingredients so we've got granulated sugar in here we also have some sweetened condensed milk and some corn syrup and we're just heating this slowly while stirring constantly trying to get that sugar dissolved that's really the main point of heating it at this stage it's just to get that sugar dissolved and incorporated once we do we're going to add our final two ingredients which are the white chocolate or sometimes mirror glazes are made with other kinds of chocolate as well dark chocolate or milk chocolate and we're also going to add gelatin the gelatin is what's responsible for mirror glaze setting crazy shiny and crazy smooth so beautiful so wonderful people really really love the look of these glazes on cakes once your sugar is dissolved it's time to add the chocolate we've turned weed the royal we i've turned the heat off of this pot and i'm going to add the chocolate to it with the pot off the heat and the residual heat um in the pot and of the sugar base should be enough to melt the white chocolate but if for some reason it gets stiff or it's not melting which actually looks like mine is going to so then you can put it back on a gentle heat until everything is totally melted [Music] also going to add my bloomed gelatin and the water that it was in [Music] once you get it as combined as possible go ahead and strain it this just gets rid of any like persistent bits of white chocolate that didn't get melted any little bits of you know anything gritty that we wouldn't want in our mirror glaze [Music] after you strain your mirror glaze you can divide it into a few different bowls just to be able to dye it some different colors if you want i'm going to do a couple different shades of pink because i kind of have a pink thing going on today so i've got some gel food coloring in the bottom of both of these bowls but i'm also going to leave some of it white chocolatey [Music] once you've got your mirror glaze the colors that you want it's a little bit of a waiting game in order for mirror glaze to work just right it has to be at the ideal consistency which is 90 degrees fahrenheit this is the perfect consistency for it to still be fluid but for it to set up fairly quickly especially when applied to something chilled i have a cake in the fridge right now this kind of glaze works especially well on something that's very smooth on the side so it's really great for things like mousse cakes no-bake cheesecakes really anything where you've got that super smooth side if you're doing it on a layer cake just make sure you give it a really nice crumb coat really thoughtful and really kind of cover the whole thing up because mirror glaze just is really going to show every single ridge i'm not the most perfect when it comes to these kinds of glazes and i don't really mind some of that texture but if you want that beautiful look that you get when you go into a bakery and they have those beautiful entremes in the case with glistening mirror glaze all around just look for the straightest smoothest possible look on your cake before you're applying the glaze i'm going to keep stirring these until they get to the right consistency and as soon as they hit 90 degrees i'll grab my cake out of the refrigerator and we'll be ready to pour when you glaze something with mirror glaze i like to work around the edge first to make sure that gets coated because it's always easier to add more to the top and it will continue to flow down the sides [Music] wow that looks cool does it not so then if you need to you can kind of swipe your your spatula over to allow access to fall down the sides but mine is absolutely the perfect consistency and i don't think i need to touch it at all but if for some reason you don't have coating on the sides just use your spatula to gently drag across the surface and that's going to move some of it to the sides and also even up your top a little bit too so that's how you glaze a cake with mirror glaze just like with any kind of baking mistakes can happen when you're making frostings icings and glazes but a lot of them i've actually already covered in this episode because most of them have to do with the consistency so what i want to focus on now is kind of showing you how to achieve that correct consistency and also what to look for to know if you're kind of fighting an uphill battle with your frosting and if it needs a little bit of work so let's start first with aerated frostings things like meringue frostings marshmallow frostings this is also something that can just happen with meringue but here's a good example of a frosting this is i'm not even going to be able to i'll have to pour it onto the cake to spread it this is a meringue style frosting and it's really really soft um so soft that as i pour it onto my cake here it's actually kind of spreading itself and again this there's nothing necessarily wrong with this but this consistency wouldn't well that's not true there is something wrong with it i don't know why i'm trying to be so nice to this frosting that's a mistake but the main thing is it's not going to hold its shape it's not going to hold its shape when piped in particular so it's just really important that when you see something like this this is usually a sign of the meringue just needing more whipping it could also mean that you're trying to make a meringue in an environment that's really humid or you got some moisture or fat in it but typically just whipping it some more is gonna bring it to that ideal consistency that's really really fluffy and spreadable and pipeable both and see how much more volume it has and i can like hold it on my spatula like this instead of having to literally pour the frosting on and both of these would toast fine but one is much easier to spread and much more stable to use as a frosting so continue to whip make sure when you're making meringue based frostings that you also take the time to clean your mixer bowl with a little bit of vinegar or lemon juice use your cream of tartar use all those things we talk about in the meringue episode to make sure that you get full volume and if it's still soft like this before you try anything else just keep whipping keep whipping at a higher speed even if it's longer than the recipe has told you to you might just need a little bit more time now with butter creams one of the biggest issues that i see has to do with the frosting once it sets see how like airy and kind of like chunky almost this is i mean chunky's a bad word because it still is smooth if you put it in your mouth you wouldn't feel any physical chunks but this is what happens when the when a buttercream sits for too long it starts to firm up and is no longer kind of this smooth consistency and i showed this a little bit earlier but the easiest way to show it is just to try to do one swipe of frosting like this without any adjustment and you can see how rough and coarse it looks but if you reconstitute the frosting which is just applying a little bit of heat to the bowl and there are two different ways you can do it which i'll talk about momentarily when you apply a little bit of heat to the bowl you allow the fat inside to soften and then it starts to re-whip with the other ingredients it starts to combine and be smooth again but as it re-whips it also takes away that warmth so you can warm it up a little bit also to reduce things like air bubbles get a smoother frosting but it's also about getting that consistency back to where it should be this is also important to know because you can make buttercreams ahead you can freeze them most of them freeze really really well and so you can kind of get a head start on your big baking project by making the frosting ahead but you are going to need to reconstitute it there are two ways to reconstitute the easiest one is to get out your friend the kitchen torch and apply some heat to the side of the bowl but if you don't have a kitchen torch you can also put your frosting in a heat safe bowl and place it over a pot of simmering water just for a few moments 10 seconds at a time just to apply a little bit of heat then start mixing it by hand once you think you've gotten it a little bit soft it can go back to the mixer and whip until it's reconstituted and again this is just really important because look at the difference this is the same frosting italian buttercream but look at the difference this reconstituted frosting when i spread it just one time so much smoother than the frosting next to it it's really important to know what you're looking for as far as consistency because if you do make a mistake you might be able to fix it before you're even ready to use your frosting [Music] thank you so much for joining me for this especially sweet episode of bake it up a notch where we took a deep dive into all things frostings icings and glazes this is such a fun episode and all of these delicious recipes are available on food 52 and i want to see what you're making so be sure to tag me emic dowel on instagram or tag food52 and use hashtag bake it up a notch be sure to keep leaving me comments of things you'd like to see in future episodes and questions that you have they might appear in one of our upcoming bite size episodes can't wait to see what you bake up and until then wishing you lots of happy baking [Music] he looks so happy doesn't he he's just like this is my best nap [Music] you

Channel: Food52

Views: 2,569,014

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, erin jeanne mcdowell, bake it up a notch, cream cheese frosting recipe, ermine buttercream, erin mcdowell frosting, how to smooth frosting on cake, how to make buttercream frosting, Mirror glaze how to, Buttercream frosting recipes, What kind of frosting to use, Marshmallow frosting recipe, how to fix frosting, Cake glazes, Whipped ganache frosting, better whipped cream, Chocolate ganache frosting

Id: 10R-83KaHeo

Length: 83min 54sec (5034 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021