Best-Ever Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting - Gemma's Bold Baking Basics Ep 27

Hi Bold Bakers! I have gotten a lot of requests asking to show you how to make a Swiss Buttercream Frosting. I have got a fool proof recipe that if you follow my step by step instructions, you will have perfect frosting every time. We're going to start out over a bain marie. I'm going to use the bowl from my KitchenAid, but you can also use any heat proof bowl. I'm going to place it over the pot of simmering water, then I'm going to add in my egg whites and my sugar. Straight in there. Now all we're going to do is just give them a mix up and we are going to wait until that sugar dissolves. Some people worry about meringue that you're eating raw eggs, but we're not eating raw eggs here because they're going to technically get cooked over the hot water. It'll take around 5 minutes for the sugar to dissolve, but you want to stand here and just give it a stir every few seconds to keep it moving around the bowl. Now you'll want to make sure that your sugar is completely dissolved and a way you can do that is bring up your spatula, run your finger through it and if you don't feel any grains of sugar, it's ready. This guy is good, so now we're going to take it off and put it onto our KitchenAid. So our next step is to whip up the meringue, so I want you to turn your machine on to a medium high speed and we're going to whip it up until it gets thick and glossy. So the difference between a Swiss meringue buttercream and a regular buttercream is that the Swiss meringue buttercream tends to be much lighter and fluffier. You get all of that air from the meringue so you get a lovely soft finish at the end. Great, this is perfect. So we've been beating for around 4-5 minutes and I want you to see this texture. You want nice, thick meringue just like this. This is perfect. Now, at this stage, now we can start to add in our butter. To flavor your buttercream, I'm going to add in some vanilla extract. You can add in any flavor you want depending on what cake you're making and a little bit of salt. Salt brings out flavor in everything. So here is my butter. Now you want your butter to be cubed and also nice and soft like this. Do you see that? It's warm here in Los Angeles so this has been sitting out for around an hour. You need your butter to be at room temperature so it whips in well into your meringue. Okay, so we're going to turn our machine back on to medium speed and we're going to add in the butter bit by bit. Once one bit of butter is fully incorporated, go ahead and add in your next piece. And then just keep on mixing until it's all combined. So that's all my butter fully combined so I'm going to go in with my spatula now and just push down the sides of the bowl and get all that butter. I see some little lumps and bumps over there. And then I'm just going to turn the machine back on to make sure those guys whip in too. Okay, great. So now this step is really important. This is where people think they went wrong. I want to show you the texture of this. Do you see how soft it is? Well of course it's going to be soft because we had warm eggs, we had room temperature butter so it's not going to be very, very stiff but don't worry because this is exactly right. What you want to do with this now is take it off the machine and put it into the fridge for a minimum of an hour and let it get nice and cold so we can whip it up again. So it's been an hour. I'm just going to whip up my buttercream again to make it nice and thick and light. So this is lovely and thick again. Now it's ready to be used. You can keep this in your fridge for up to a week in an airtight container and the best thing of all is it actually freezes really well for up to 8 weeks. You just want to take it out, let it get at room temperature and then ice any of your cakes with it. I have lots more Bold Baking Basics videos just like this one so make sure you go check those out.