Custard Buttercream
This is a rich buttercream icing made with the addition of custard. It can be embellished by adding various flavoured liquors, aromatic essences and food colouring. This is my basic time-tested recipe for decorating cakes and cupcakes. Makes enough buttercream for one 3 to 4 layer cake or 24 cupcakes.
Ingredients
Makes: 650 g buttercream
- 1 egg
- 200g caster sugar
- 125ml milk
- 300g butter, room temperature
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 tablespoon rum or other liquor (optional)
Directions
Preparation:15min ›
Cook:10min ›
Extra time:1hour ›
Ready in:1hour25min
- In a small, heavy saucepan beat egg with a fork, then mix in sugar and milk. Cook on medium low heat, whisking constantly, so that it does not stick to the bottom. When just starting to boil, start stirring non-stop until it thickens to a thin custard consistency. Take off heat and cool completely (see footnote).
- Beat butter until light and creamy, around 5 minutes. Start adding cooled custard, 1 to 2 tablespoons at a time, beating after each addition. Add vanilla and any other flavourings at the end. Beat until a very light and fluffy consistency is reached.
- Use the buttercream to decorate your cooled cake or cupcakes, ensuring they are cooled completely to prevent the buttercream from melting. For best results when using a pastry bag, chill the buttercream in bag in the fridge for 1 hour. Chilled buttercream creates better defined shapes when used for cake decorating.
Custard tip
It is important that custard is completely cooled, otherwise it will melt the butter. The custard can be made ahead and chilled in the fridge till needed.
Butter
This recipe contains quite a bit of butter, for ease of decorating with a pastry bag and to help the piped icing to hold its shape. If you don't intend to create elaborate decorations and just want to simply ice your cake, you can decrease the butter to 200g.
Variations
For chocolate version add 1 Tablespoon cocoa-powder or Nutella. You can omit vanilla, but I really like to add 1 Tablespoon of rum or cognac to this buttercream. Other liquors can create interesting variations too: coconut (Malibu), orange (Grand Marnier), lemon (Limoncello) - depending on the cake you have in mind.
Watch a video of it being made…
Custard Buttercream
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Reviews and Ratings
Global Ratings:
(40)
Reviews in English (5)
Did not like it. Way too much butter. Not a very good flavor. - 19 Dec 2018 (Review from Allrecipes USA and Canada)
exquisite and silky. I used this recipe as the filling in my Nanaimo bar. Custard from scratch really elevates it, I'll probably never go back to custard powder. I did omit the rum flavouring and used two egg yolks in places of the whole egg, for extra silkiness. - 14 Dec 2018 (Review from Allrecipes USA and Canada)
Thank you for sharing this recipe. I did not know there was another way to make buttercream icing. This is pretty good! I made it exactly as written and it turned out well. It was a little bit too buttery for my taste though. After making it I saw the note in the recipe that said you could cut the butter back to 1 cup. (I had used the full 1 1/3 cup stated in the ingredients.) So, I adjusted the mixture by adding a proportional amount of powdered sugar and vanilla to make up for the extra 1/3 cup of “extra” butter. That turned out very good! Next time I will make the recipe as written with just 1 cup of butter & update this review. Thanks again for sharing! - 21 Oct 2018 (Review from Allrecipes USA and Canada)