White Butter Cream Recipe

Butter cream is a great cake filling and can be flavoured with pretty much anything.

Because of the butter content the colour is an off white/yellow.

This is not a problem for cake filling but is a draw back when you want a white butter cream covering.

I am currently making a wedding cake for a couple who do not like marzipan and want to avoid the traditional cake covering of marzipan and fondant icing.

So how do you make white butter cream when butter is always some shade of yellow?

The answer is that it is not possible to get bright white butter cream but there is a way of making it paler.

Below is a method for doing this.

The amounts below should fill and cover an 8″ round cake.

I will give the formula to scale up your recipe for larger cakes at the end of the post.

112g butter (as pale as you can find) or half butter half margarine (room temperature)
450g confectioners (icing) sugar
1 tsp clear vanilla essence or rose water
milk as required
3 tsp superwhite

Superwhite is a concentrated white powder made by Sugar Flair Colours ltd. It can be added to whiten off white royal icing and in this case butter cream.

Sugar Flair is stocked by sugarcraft suppliers throughout the UK.

It is helpful to have an electric mixer with whisk attachment for this recipe. You can use a hand held electric mixer although there is a lot of whisking required for a prolonged length of time - the longer you whisk the paler the colour will be. Might make for a sore shoulder!

Begin by whisking the butter on medium speed. If you are using a mixer with whisk attachment you can weigh and sieve the confectioners sugar while the butter is being whisked.

Add the sugar a little at time (if you add lots you will be covered in a cloud of white dust). As you do this you can add a little milk to help the butter and sugar mix - do not add too much at this stage.

Add the vanilla essence or rose water.

Add the superwhite a tsp at a time - this way you can judge when your butter cream is white enough. Add more if you want a whiter result.

Once all the sugar is added continue to whisk the mixture on a meduim speed until the texture is smooth and the colour is pale.

Add more milk if necessary to reach a consistency that is suitable for covering your cake.

I have specified 3 tsp in the recipe because it gave me a satisfactory result and as spuerwhite is sold in 20g pots it would get costly to add large amounts of it. Although if you only have make this recipe once in a while it would be worth buying a little more superwhite.

Here is the butter cream I made using the recipe above.

If you find that this butter cream is not white enough there are alternative recipes such as white swiss meringue which is a combination of egg whites, butter and sugar.

It requires the use of a thermometer to get the sugar and egg whites to the right temperature.

When reading some of these type of recipes they can seem really complicated with the possibility of failure of you don’t get every single bit right.

Don’t be put off though, have a look at a few and try one out.

Scaling up recipe for larger cakes.

It is not as important to scale up a butter cream recipe as a cake recipe but it will avoid the wastage that can come with simply doubling or trebling a recipe.

If you wanted the recipe for a 10″ cake the formula is as follows:

10 (10″ cake) divided by 8 (size of cake in recipe) which gives you 1.25
All you need to do then is multiply your recipe amounts by 1.25

For example 112g butter multiplied by 1.25 gives you 140g butter

For an 11″ cake you divide 11 by 8 giving you 1.375
You then multiply your recipe amounts by 1.375

You can use this method for any cake recipe. Just remember to divide by the size of cake in the original recipe.

If you try the white butter cream recipe leave a comment to let me know how it worked out for you.