Sawsen's Eggless Buttercream Frosting

Directions:

1. Ensure that all ingredients are at room temperature before starting. Pour the milk, protein powder and powdered sugar into a jug and combine until the powders are melted.
2. Place the butter in a stand mixer. Using the whip attachment, start on low to soften the butter, and slowly pour in your liquid. Build up to high speed and beat until all of the ingredients are well combined. The mixture will go through the familiar Swiss buttercream stages, first appearing curdled, then lumpy, then beginning to smooth and aerate but still tasting like sweetened butter. At this point switch to a paddle attachment.
3. Your buttercream will finally reach a light, fluffy and voluminous mixture which tastes like whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. This should take around 7-10 minutes in total. Use as you would traditional Swiss buttercream.

Notes*

1. Temperature is crucial! Too cold and the mixture will take forever- like 45 minutes on high – to combine, and will keep climbing the edges of the bowl. Too warm and you have butter soup. Ensure your ingredients are all between 22-25 degrees C to make sure they whip up nicely!
2. Protein powder is used to substitute the protein from egg whites.
3. If you live in a different country or can’t buy these protein powders, you can use any pure, unflavoured, soluble protein powder with more than 70% protein content per 100g. To see a few protein powders that don’t work, watch the end of the video about protein powder substitutions, here. Examples of what don’t work are protein shakes, pea, almond, hemp protein powders, egg replacers, cornstarch – any of these will make your buttercream grainy or weird tasting.
4. Some icing/ powdered sugar contains cornstarch. While some people don’t notice it, this does lead to a very slightly grainy texture to the buttercream. Please use one which is free of cornstarch, or grind your own from regular sugar. In the UK I use Silver Spoon or Aldi brand icing sugars, both of which don’t contain any (NB: cornflour/ cornstarch is sometimes listed as modified maize starch, or an E number between E1400-1500).
5. If not using real butter do make sure you have a true block type butter substitute. It must set absolutely solid in the fridge to work right, like butter does. You should be able to poke it firmly with your finger and not leave a dent in the chilled block. Do NOT use margarine out of a tub or anything you can spread directly from the fridge, like Flora, Vitalite, Pure spreads and so on, or a spreadable shortening like Crisco, as the buttercream will stay too soft to work with as I show in my videos. I have had countless queries from people asking why their vegan or dairy free buttercream is too soft, only to find they used a spreadable margarine because they couldn’t find butter substitute in a solid block.