How to Make Swiss Meringue Buttercream (SMBC)

hey everyone i'm liz merrick with the sugar geek show and today we're going to talk about making swiss meringue buttercream the best buttercream ever so swiss meringue buttercream is a lot like easy buttercream in fact my easy buttercream is adapted from swiss meringue buttercream i used to make swiss meringue buttercream every single time i had to make a wedding cake and while it is really really good it is super time consuming so if you're looking for a shortcut to swiss meringue buttercream check out my easy buttercream recipe so the easy buttercream recipe uses something called pasteurized egg whites which is this guy right here this is what i use to make easy buttercream [Music] but if you're going to make swiss meringue buttercream the old-fashioned way you're gonna have to use egg whites from an egg and these are not pasteurized so the difference between easy buttercream and swiss meringue buttercream is basically the egg whites so let's go ahead and start making our swiss meringue buttercream i have all my ingredients out i have a couple inches of water poured into a like a saucepan and i'm going to bring it to a simmer this is called a double boiler or a bain-marie french i have a stainless steel mixing bowl here that i'm going to be making my meringue in you want to make sure your stainless steel bowl is like super clean no fat or oil or anything in here especially if you've made buttercream in this because any small amounts of fat can actually cause your meringue to not whip up some people ask if you can use a glass bowl to do this and you can but it's going to take a lot longer for your meringue to cool down i have my butter here this is softened butter you should be able to put your fingerprint in softened butter and it should be able to make an indent but the butter still basically holds its shape that's perfect you crack your egg on the countertop and then we're going to crack our egg into a bowl and then i'm going to save my egg yolks for using something later make sure there's no stray egg yolk bits in there and then you can transfer that to your main bowl so if you get a little stray egg yolk in there see that my egg yolk broke while i was cracking it into this bowl so i cannot use that egg at all so this water should just be simmering it doesn't need to be like crazy boiling hot and make sure that the bowl is not sitting inside the water because then you could actually like cook your egg whites and we don't want scrambled eggs so i'm going to place my egg whites in here and then my sugar and then i'm just going to give that a quick little whisk basically we're just going to whisk this every 30 seconds or so just to make sure that the liquids are heating evenly we're not trying to like whisk it just kind of moving it around and if you dip your finger in here and feel it you can feel the grains of sugar in the egg white so we want to keep whisking this and letting it heat until you can't feel those grains of sugar anymore or if you want to use a thermometer when your mixture reaches 110 degrees fahrenheit it's hot enough i also kind of try and work the mixture up onto the sides of the bowl to make sure that i'm getting any kind of stray granules of sugar i want all of that melted almost there the mixture is pretty warm too so don't be surprised when you stick your finger in there it's a little bit hot you'll notice that the liquids just start getting kind of looser too when it gets closer to the right stage it'll seem less like really thick egg white and start feeling more a little like watery and that's because the sugar is dissolving okay i can't feel any greens of sugar in there feels nice and smooth so i'm going to go ahead and remove that from the heat all right so now we're going to put this onto our stand mixer you could do this by hand with a hand mixer definitely possible so it's going to take longer and a little bit more elbow grease so now we're going to whip this up to firm peaks so that means that our meringue is going to stick straight up when it's ready okay it's been three minutes and i just want to do a little check get down on the sides you see the meringue is falling over that's not stiff enough yet [Music] all right it's been about probably five or six minutes now and probably could still go a little bit more the tips of those meringues are still falling over although it is getting stiffer yeah a little bit longer okay i can tell that is definitely nice and stiff you can see it's standing straight up obviously if your little tendrils are too long they're not gonna stand up but that's definitely what you're looking for okay so now before we start making our actual buttercream we have to let this meringue cool down if you feel the bottom of the bowl it's probably still pretty warm if you add buttercream into this it's just going to melt into a soupy mess so what i do is i just scoop all my meringue out and put it just into like a cake pan or a dish or something to just kind of spread out the uh you know so it's not just so compact and then i'm gonna put this in the fridge for like 10 minutes and then it will be cool super fast okay so my meringue is nice and cool i touched it and it doesn't feel warm anymore let me just put that back in the bowl it's a little bit sticky whisk back on okay so now we have our softened butter we're gonna start adding it in in small chunks i just use my fingers this is whisking all the butter into the meringue and it's making this nice and fluffy it's gonna taste amazing then you can go ahead and add in your vanilla and don't forget your salt since we used unsalted butter your buttercream is not going to be very salty but you still need a little bit to cut that sweetness and intensify the flavor when your buttercream is done it should look very silky not yellow and if you give it a taste it should taste like cream and not butter if it does taste like butter you need to whip it more just gonna give this a little taste oh my god it's so good it never gets old okay so almost all butter has kind of like a yellowish tinge to it and that is just from the butter sometimes you'll notice that like lower quality butters will be even more yellow and that's because way back in the day high quality butter was considered to be a better quality the more yellow it was this is not necessarily the case anymore so some companies still will put yellow food coloring in their butter to make it more yellow so annoying so to counteract that and to get rid of air bubbles i'm going to switch to the paddle attachment and i'm going to put a couple of drops of violet food coloring into my buttercream and this violet or purple or whatever you have is going to counteract the yellow that's in the buttercream and make it appear more white so i'm gonna go ahead and let my buttercream mix for about 10 minutes on low the buttercream is done you could totally use it right now but what this does is it just takes all the bubbles out of the buttercream so it's super duper smooth totally an extra step but i do it so now our buttercream is very smooth it doesn't have a lot of bubbles in it you could just keep mixing this until it was completely bubble free but i'm going to go ahead and say that's good this is enough buttercream to frost one eight inch round cake inside and out and uh the great thing about swiss meringue buttercream is it's completely stable you can leave this at room temperature for two days if you really needed to and if you need to store it you can put leftovers in the refrigerator for a week or you can freeze it for up to six months it's great for going underneath fondant it's stable enough to pipe rosettes or you know cupcakes whatever you need to do with it you can flavor it with curds extracts it's amazing it's seriously the best buttercream ever so that's everything there is to know about making swiss marine buttercream hopefully this has been a great tutorial for you guys and you've learned a lot about making swiss meringue buttercream i'm liz merrick and i'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: Sugar Geek Show

Views: 270,886

Keywords: cake, sugar geek show, tutorial, lizzo marek, swiss meringue buttercream, cake decorating, how to make, italian meringue, how to, meringue (food), how to make buttercream, buttercream frosting, food (tv genre), buttercream (food), how to bake, step by step, icing (food), easy recipes, buttercream frosting recipe, cake videos, how to make swiss meringue buttercream, swiss meringue, meringue, cooked frosting, cakes

Id: uSoOmBZ7md8

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019