Can I Make 4-minute Buttercream?

I've been experiment with cake decorating and baking. One of the cakes I wanted to make was inspired by an intergalactic sculptural hat I made for a Lady Gaga concert in 2010! I would need a lot of buttercream to decorate it. Before making the hat, I decided to make a silver spin on the Scran Line's Bad Romance cupcake -- check out that "Rhino Cupcake" post.

For the Rhino cupcake and the Intergalactic Hat cupcake, I decided to make the 4-minute Buttercream I saw in a YouTube video from the British Girl Bakes.

I actually tried to make buttercream before for this brain cake in honor of my Mom. The cake really looks like a brain. The buttercream was not that successful however though (haha!); I think I messed up the recipe by using twice as much butter as I was supposed too. Haha!

Attempt #1:

Ingredients: - Butter

- Powdered sugar

- Vanilla extract (or other extract)

- Milk

Check out British Girl Bakes YouTube video & website for the details and tips & tricks.

In the video, she mentions that it is important that the butter should be room temp. I put out the butter for ~30 min. ahead before I started. When I started the butter was not frozen, but was a little cool -- not room temp. I think that has implications for later.

I added all the ingredients (sifted powdered sugar, butter, milk, a little mint extract, didn't have vanilla) and mixed it together. It looks kind of okay here, but...

Then I thought it was too thick, so I added milk to thin it out, but too much. Then I thought it was too thin, so I added some more powdered sugar.

I tried to add black food coloring to make it grey.

RESULT: Fail.

We are good at this? It had a weird consistency. I think the problems were that the butter was not completely room temp when I started and I overzealously added too much milk to it. Or I couldn't really fix it once I started.

From a visual perspective, it looked cool! I put it on my cupcake and made the Rhino cupcake.

For my Intergalactic Sculptural Hat Cake that I was making the next day, I put some butter out to make sure it was room temp...You can also just microwave it at 10-second intervals...Check out how that attempt went below.

Attempt #2:

Here is the soft room temp butter and the sifted powdered sugar.

Then I crossed my fingers and mixed it together.

RESULT: Success!

We are good at this! Nice buttercream! The butter was room temp and I held back on adding milk. Now that I know how to make it, I have been using it for different cake decorating projects. :)

I I added some black food coloring to make it grey. There is a pic of the frosted cake, but not the complete Intergalactic Sculptural Hat (that's in a separate post) below.

Give it a try! We are good at this!