How to Make Chocolate Buttercream

Today on Sugar Spun Run I'll be showing you how to make chocolate buttercream frosting.

Hey Sugar Spun Bakers! Today I'm sharing a chocolate version of my classic Americanbuttercream frosting.

I shared that video a little while ago.

A lot of you haveasked me how to make it a chocolate version.

It's very simple.

So today I'mgoing to show you exactly how to do just that.

Now I'm going to be using my standmixer today, you could do this with a hand mixer , or using a hand mixer instead, either is completely fine.

Now the first ingredient that you'll need is twosticks or one cup of unsalted butter, and you want this to be softened to room temperature.

I'm going to be adding these to the bowl of my stand mixer.

Now I really love using unsalted butter in most of my recipes because we'll beadding the salt to taste.

Now this gives us better control over the amount of salt in our recipe and more importantly over the taste of our icing.

Now let's go ahead and just cream this butter with our mixer until it's smooth and creamy.

Now you want to cream the butter first because if it's not completely softened, what could happen is you could have some butter lumps in there that are just kindof hard to beat out of the frosting.

You can end up with a slightly lumpyfrosting that can be hard to pipe so we're just going to cream the butterfirst.

Now our butter looks pretty good solet's move on to our next ingredient, the powdered sugar.

You will need three and ahalf cups of powdered sugar for this recipe.

To start I'm just going to addabout half of this into the bowl of my stand mixer.

Nw we're going to be usingcocoa powder to make this buttercream into a chocolate buttercream.

You can useeither natural or Dutch processed cocoa, either is fine, today I'm using a naturalcocoa powder.

Now if you really want to enhance the chocolate flavor here, a pinch of espresso powder would be a great addition.

I'm not going to beadding that today but I am going to be adding a pinch of salt.

This is just 1/8 teaspoon of salt, and you can see I got a little cocoa powder in there.

I'm also going to be adding our vanilla extract.

Even though this is a chocolatebuttercream the vanilla gives you a nice depth of flavor.

It just wouldn't havequite the same flavor if you left out this flavoring, and this is just ateaspoon and a half of vanilla extract.

We're also going to be adding some heavycream to this recipe.

Now you'll need about 2 to 4 tablespoons of heavy cream total, but for starters we're just going to add two tablespoons.

If you don't have heavy cream, milk will work instead, but since milk is thinner you'll want to start with just a little bit less.

Startwith just one tablespoon of milk.

You'll want to start mixing all of youringredients together on low speed this is to keep the sugar and the cocoapowder from flying all over your kitchen.

If you're using a hand mixer youdefinitely want to keep the mixer on low speed.

Trust me.

Now if you're using a stand mixer you can use my favorite trick which is totake a clean kitchen towel and just drape it over the mixer and the bowl, andthen still you want to start with your mixer on low speed but you can graduallyincrease the speed to medium.

Alright, let's take a look at it.

So far so good.

So if you're using a hand mixer you will just keep your mixer on low speed andgradually add more powdered sugar.

I am going to just add the rest of mypowdered sugar here because I'm going to use my towel trick, and even though weare using a stand mixer here and we're using this fancy towel trick, I do stillrecommend adding the sugar in two parts because otherwise your towel will becovered in powdered sugar and you take it off it'll just be a mess.

So I stillrecommend adding the sugar in parts.

Alright so everything is pretty muchcombined.

As you can probably tell from looking at it, we're not quite done yet.

There's some sugars stuck to the bottom.

So I'm going to just take my spatula andscrape the sides and bottom of the bowl and then we'll mix everything again.

Now here's where you'll decide if youneed to add more heavy cream or not.

This frosting is pretty stiff and I want athinner frosting.

I want it to be better for spreading because I'm going to beusing it on a layer cake so I'm going to add additional heavy cream.

I'm justgoing to add a tablespoon at a time.

So we'll start with one tablespoon and Iwill gradually increase my mixer speed from low to high and just whip thatcream in there for about 15 seconds on high speed.

And whipping the cream inthere does lighten the color of your frosting for sure, just something to keep in mind if you're looking for a particular color to your frosting.

So this I actually want to make a little bit thinner, and you do want totaste-test your frosting.

This could use a little bit more salt so I'm going toadd just another pinch of salt as well.

Alright this is actually perfect for me.

The taste is good.

The texture is silky smooth and just perfect for spreadingover a cake.

If you would like you can absolutely add a little bit more cream, another tablespoon at a time, or if you make your frosting accidentally too thinyou can add more powdered sugar.

So it's pretty hard to mess this one up, but this is perfect for me so I'm going to go ahead and spread it on a cake now.

Now this chocolate buttercream recipe will frost a two layer eight inch, or 9-inchround cake.

It'll frost a nine by thirteen inch sheet cake.

It will alsogenerously frost a dozen cupcakes, or if you're just spreading the frosting ontop it'll cover 24 cupcakes.

And that is how easy it is to make a chocolatebuttercream frosting.

I hope you guys enjoy today's super easy recipe and ifyou try this one out please let me know what you think.

I always love hearing from you.

Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.

(That's good icing).