Frosting Recipes: Shortening or Butter?
Frosting recipes rely upon fat to create flavor and texture. As we see, there is enormous variety in the fats used in frosting recipes. We seen cream cheese and whipped cream but also yogurt and avocados. All of these contribute to a rich, delicious cake or cupcake frosting.
Two of the most common fats used to make frosting from scratch are butter and vegetable shortening. Just like in pie crust recipes, bakers have very strong feelings about which one (or combination of the two) produce the best results.
The advantage of using butter in a frosting recipe is its flavor. Butter adds a rich, melt-in-your-mouth feeling to the frosting. Using vegetable shortening can be preferable for its texture, because it makes for a lighter, fluffier frosting. However, shortening is all fat (butter is around 80% fat) and not especially flavorful.
The solution? We’re now trying a combination of butter and trans-fat free vegetable shortening (Smart Balance, Spectrum Organics and Crisco make it) to achieve the best frosting flavor and texture. Ratio of each to be determined! We’ll let you know how it goes.
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