How To Make Easy Frosting

Hi. I'm Eloise from the Gourmet Cupcake Company in Chelmsford, in Essex. I'm going to show you some handy how-to's on icing and decorating cupcakes.

So now, I'm going to show you how to make easy frosting. The first thing we need is 250 grams of unsalted butter. The butter really needs to be soft, so if you've just taken it out of the fridge, you have to wait a couple of hours, until it's room temperature.

This is just so it's easier to mix and combine with the icing sugar in the mixer. So I'll put the butter in first. The next thing we need is 500 grams of icing sugar.

So this is just normal, plain icing sugar, and I'm going to add this to the butter. So, I've got a large, free-standing mixer here, but if you don't have one of these, you can use any kind of hand whisk, using the beater attachments on that. So just put your ingredients in a separate bowl, put your hand beater in with the beat attachments, and just mix it up like I'm going to now.

These are particularly useful because they have this on the top, so this icing sugar guard helps to keep the ingredients in the bowl. So, first of all, I'm going to turn the mixer onto a low speed, and the reason we do this is just to make sure you don't blast all the icing sugar out of the bowl. So we want to mix it on a really low speed, until it starts to combine in, and after it starts to combine, then you can turn it up to a higher speed, and beat it then for around about two to three minutes.

Just watch it and make sure that it's going really light and fluffy. So I'm going to turn the mixer on now. So as you can see, now it's starting to combine, so this is the point where you can turn the mixer up to a higher, and we're going to do that, as I said, two to three minutes.

Okay, so now that's done, you can see the color's slightly pale yellow, and the consistency. So now, at this point, to the frosting I'm going to just add some vanilla extract. So for this quantity, I'm going to add a teaspoon.

And then put it back in the mixer and mix it up again. So that's the frosting, all done. That's vanilla flavor; you can add other natural extracts, like lemon, or orange, or rose.

So the same principle: just a teaspoon of each. And this kind of icing, because it is just butter and icing sugar, you can store it in the fridge for as long as your butter lasts. Because all you've done is add sugar to it.

And then, when you need it, just remove it from the fridge, and leave it for a couple of hours, to get back to room temperature, mix it up again, a little bit in the bowl, and then it's ready to use. So that's how you make easy frosting. .