A pretty pair – The rise of butter cream cakes

Butter cream has been considered for a long time in New Zealand as an American icing. Lately it has become a requested icing for all flavour of cakes.

Butter cream has evolved from a flavourless, fat tasting icing, into a soft light icing which is full of flavour – that is, if it’s made from scratch. Basically, butter cream icing consists of butter, egg, icing sugar and flavour.

We make hundreds of butter cream iced cupcakes a week, and now do a range of boutique cakes layered with butter cream.

We always use natural flavour and don’t use any food colouring in the either the topping of the base.

Some of the flavours we use are:

Strawberry
Raspberry - pictured above on a classic chocolate cake
Lemon - pictured above on a lemon syrup cake
Orange
Salted caramel
Lemon cream cheese

However, there are two serious limitations of butter cream cakes.

The icing is very heat sensitive 

This means that the cake must be refrigerated. It is not suitable to be out of the fridge any more than 30 minutes in summer, or one hour in winter. This does limit the practicality of butter cream as an icing on cakes ordered for delivery.

Fondant icing on the other hand, requires no refrigeration and is the icing of choice if a cake must be delivered. 

As butter cream is a wet finish

Decorations on the cake are limited in a way that fondant isn’t. Decorations need to put on a butter cream cake just before serving as they can slide off and damage a cake in transit.

So when you are ordering a custom cake for delivery, it pays to know your icing options.

The good news about fondant

When cakes are iced with fondant they do have a layer of buttercream under the fondant, to adhere the fondant to the cake - so even in fondant cakes the butter cream component isn’t entirely lost.

Winter is coming, and that is the ideal season to have butter cream cakes.