Buttercream Icing

By Reesie

Butter cream icing for stiff consistency

Ingredients

• 1 c Crisco
• 1 tsp Wilton flavor (butter, almond or vanilla)
• 7-8 tsp milk or water
• 1 lb powdered sugar
• 1 tbsp Wilton Meringue powder
• pinch of salt

Preparation

Step 1

Cream shortening, salt, flavoring and water/milk. (Note: I normally use a mix of butter, almond and vanilla but you can use just regular vanilla if you don’t need the icing to be pure white. Also, I use half water and half lemon juice where it calls for the water/milk because the lemon juice cuts the sweetness and shortening taste a little bit but you can’t really taste it. The only trick with adding lemon juice is you don’t want to use it if you want purple icing because it will cause the purple to fade to a grayish blue color.) Add dry ingredients and mix on medium speed until all ingredients have been thoroughly mixed together. (I add my powdered sugar in parts, half with the meringue powder and blend and then add the rest.) Blend an additional minute or so, until creamy.



*More Suzi notes: You will want to use a Kitchen Aide mixer or something like that when you make this. It is really stiff and can kill a hand mixer. Also, I normally mix a double batch at a time, that way you can just dump a whole 2lb bag of powdered sugar in and you don’t have to worry about measuring it. Plus, you will use a batch worth to ice a standard 8” double layer round cake and then the other batch for decorating. Another thing I do is hold a kitchen towel around the mixer and mixer bowl when I am mixing the powdered sugar in so that it doesn’t go flying everywhere.



Because this is Utah, and it is so dry, I find that I have to add more water – probably about another Tbsp per recipe for the stiff stuff. You will only use the stiff if you are making roses and stand up decorations. You will mostly use medium for the decorations and thin for icing the cake. For medium, you need to add an additional tsp of water for each cup of stiff or 1 tbsp for the full batch. For thin, you will need to add 2 tsp of water per cup of stiff or 2 tbsp for the whole batch. Again, sometimes I have to add extra water even for the medium and thin to get the right consistency.