No tags yet.
Rachel's Birthday Blackberry Buttercream
QUICK FACTS:
Original Recipe: Lemon Cupcakes with Blackberry Buttercream
Found on: Pinterest; The Gracious Wife blog
Link: https://www.thegraciouswife.com/lemon-cupcakes-with-blackberry-buttercream/
Whenever I get a baking request, I spend hours pouring through recipes online and on Pinterest in order to find the one that looks the best to me - now I’ll be honest, sometimes some look really amazing but either include ingredients that are more difficult to get or that I don’t have on hand, or the recipe itself just seems needlessly complicated. This may surprise you, but icing recipes are some of the hardest for me to decide on - probably because I’m very picky about my icing, plus our friend group doesn’t like things to be TOO sweet, and trust me when I say there are so many icing recipes that involve a scary amount of icing sugar.
For Rachel’s birthday cupcakes, she requested that I make a vanilla cupcake with a blackberry buttercream (we’re a bit blackberry obsessed as a group right now, you may notice them coming up a lot in the next little while because they’re also just plain delicious) - so as expected, I turned to Pinterest and started combing through blackberry icing recipes. Now, there aren’t a ton of them, but there were enough of them that I ended up narrowing it down to two, and ultimately working off one of them. I say working off, because true to my other baking adventures, I didn’t actually follow the recipe… oops. (You can find the link to the original recipe above!)
That being said, there are definitely a few things I’m going to differently next time, so I’ve written out my hypothetical perfect blackberry buttercream recipe below, which include the planned tweaks!
Ingredients:
2 containers of blackberries
2 tbsp of lemon juice
1 cup butter (softened)
1 1/2 - 2 cups icing sugar or powdered sugar
2 tbsp of milk or heavy cream (room temperature)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions:
- In a pot on medium heat, bring the blackberries and lemon juice to a simmer. Allow it to simmer, stirring regularly for approximately 20 minutes or until the blackberries have completely broken apart and it’s reduced down to around 1/4-1/2 cup of liquid. Let it cool completely.
- Beat the softened butter with either a hand or stand mixer until completely smooth and fluffy. Add in the powdered sugar, vanilla and blackberry sauce, and add the milk or heavy cream as needed to make a spreadable texture. Beat until very fluffy, under five minutes.
- Pipe or spread onto cupcakes or cake (or a spoon, it’s delicious!)
The original recipe called for four cups of icing sugar - I know I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I always always always cut down the amount of icing sugar in icing recipes, and even when I do, it usually still ends up being on just this side of too sweet! That’s what happened this time: I cut the icing sugar down to two cups, but we all agreed that it could have probably been even less sweet in order to allow the blackberry flavour to truly shine through! I also upped the amount of lemon juice in the reduction, lemon juice does a great job of brightening and bringing through berry flavours, and I didn’t feel as though the one tablespoon the original recipe called for cut it.
A word of warning: MAKE SURE ALL OF YOUR INGREDIENTS ARE THE SAME TEMPERATURE. I honestly can’t stress this enough since I didn’t when making this and ended up turning to google to try and figure out how to save a broken buttercream. What’s a broken buttercream you ask? Well it’s when the fat from the butter separates from everything else and you end up with this weird almost couscous texture… Disaster. Apparently this happens most frequently when your ingredients aren’t the same temperature, so the butter hardens but in the weirdest way possible. I even know the moment mine broke: when I added the milk. I foolishly added it straight from the fridge, so you can imagine the rest. Thank goodness for google - I did a quick search on how to fix a broken buttercream, and while there were a lot of tips out there, the one I decided to try is forever going to be my go-to so I want to share it with you babes!
If the worst happens, and your buttercream breaks, don’t panic: scoop out about a 1/3 cup into a microwaveable bowl, and microwave it for about 30 seconds or until its basically melted. Then, pour it into your broken buttercream and beat it with your mixer: the warmth from the microwaved bit of icing melts the butter globules enough that your buttercream turns back into a lovely, smooth icing ready to use!
This icing not only tastes great, but it’s gorgeous - I wish I had thought to take a picture! It turns into this beautiful purple colour, and because I didn’t strain out all the seeds, you see glimpses of the original berries! So pretty.
Definitely going to be an icing I make again, and again - and probable tweak a few more times! But for now, I consider it to be perfect, and I hope you will too!
Happy baking babes!
