The Best Buttercream Frosting Recipe. Ever.

The absolute best buttercream frosting recipe you'll find with a secret ingredient I have been using for over a decade! This recipe was in my cookbook and has been featured everywhere! This will frost one 8 inch cake, if you need to frost a large cake make sure to double it!

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This is THE original salted buttercream frosting recipe that went viral and has been shared by hundreds of thousands of people – and this recipe has been read tens of millions of times!

Millions Have Enjoyed this Recipe

This was my very first viral recipe here on The Kitchen Magpie! If you like this, you should try my Lemon Buttercream Frosting recipe. This recipe is the best thanks to sweet and salty mixing together!

When I first wrote this recipe 9 years ago, no one was using salted butter in their frostings – or at least there weren’t any posted online that I could find.This recipe made it in to my cookbook, that’s how amazing it is! This recipe was one of the first on my website and has been viewed by tens of millions of people over the years! Isn’t that crazy?

This buttercream icing is still is amazing, melt in your mouth, whippy, ultimate swirly cupcake worthy. It was fantastic on the homemade chocolate cake I made to go with it the very first time I whipped it up. The cake was dense and moist, and paired with a light as air buttercream icing… heaven. Angels dancing on your taste buds. I’ve tried it on every cupcake that you can imagine and it’s even amazing on vanilla. Salty vanilla icing on a vanilla cupcake is heaven for vanilla lovers!

Please go and have a read of my Buttercream Icing FAQ which answers a lot of the questions about this recipe asked in the hundreds of comments on this post below!

The most important is How to Fix Broken Buttercream, that’s a whole post in itself!

Frosting Ingredients

There are four basic ingredients for this buttercream frosting and I have kept it simple and straightforward for years now:

Salted butter – a good quality, tastes-good-off-the-spoon butter is important!
Vanilla – You need that classic vanilla taste
Icing sugar – This is also known as powdered sugar or confectioners sugar
Coffee cream – This is literally called coffee cream here in Canada but what it is is a cream that is 18% milk fat and up

Commonly Asked Frosting/Icing Questions and Answers

Do I have to refrigerate a cake with buttercream?

This buttercream has butter and it has whipping cream in it. I personally leave it out all day and it’s fine ( butter is always fine at room temperature) but the whipping cream? That’s a personal call for you. I have left it out overnight, but I honestly have to tell you to refrigerate it instead of leaving it out. But it’s really a personal decision. Apparently because of all the sugar you can leave a cake with buttercream frosting out for 2-3 days.

How long can you leave a cake with buttercream icing out?

I leave mine out for a day, not in the hot sun at all and it’s fine. According to the US food and inspection agency, you can leave a cake with buttercream frosting out for 2-3 days.

What is the best butter to use?

Salted and organic butter is literally the best butter that you can use. It is the salt that really makes this the best buttercream frosting ever. It’s actually a myth that salted butter is an inferior quality – it’s not. It’s the same quality.

How do I make the frosting stiffer?

You will want to use less cream in order to make the frosting stiffer. Start out with only a small amount of cream and add it until you get the consistency that you want.

close up of buttercream icing swirl on a chocolate cupcake

How do you thicken up frosting?

This buttercream frosting is thick to start without adding in the cream! To start, beat in the icing sugar and see what the thickness of the frosting is. Then you can add a little bit of cream, a little at a time, until you reach the desired consistency. IF you go too far, you then can add more icing sugar/powdered sugar to thicken it back up.

How do you soften buttercream?

This one is easy, leave it out on the counter at room temperature for 45-60 minutes and it will be soft! If that doesn’t work and your frosting is too thick, then you might have to beat it again and add some more cream.

Can you store butter based frostings in the refrigerator?

You bet! Buttercream frosting/icing can be stored in the refrigerator for a week or two, as long as the whipping cream that you use wasn’t going to expire soon.

Can you freeze butter based icings?

I freeze it all the time! Simply defrost, mix and use as normal.

chocolate cupcakes topped with a swirl of buttercream frosting

Tips and Tricks for the Best Buttercream Frosting

Always use salted butter. When I first wrote this recipe in 2010 there weren’t many people that were food blogging compared to today, so I literally couldn’t find a SINGLE buttercream frosting recipe on the internet that used salted butter! Now I am sure that if I looked there would be tons of recipes similar to this one. Oh, how times have changed! So I had discovered that salt and sweet are a match made in heaven for icing and I never looked back. You can also read about the difference between salted and unsalted butter.
Whip that butter, with a paddle beater if you have it, if not, don’t worry. You can also use the beaters on your handheld mixer just fine to beat the buttercream frosting! You want the butter to be smooth and creamy before you add the icing sugar.
Fresh icing sugar makes all the difference. Icing sugar/powdered sugar/confectioners sugar goes stale, and you can sure taste it when it does! Crack open a fresh bag for icings, you won’t be sorry! Over the years many people have agreed that this is another trick to making great buttercream frosting.
You can make this frosting as light or as heavy as you want by adjusting the amount of heavy cream that you use.
Read this if you are looking for piping techniques.

Some More Frosting Recipes:

Happy baking everyone!

Love,

Karlynn