French Buttercream

Channeling Parisian patisserie for your bake du jour? Give this French buttercream recipe a go. Unlike American buttercream (a simple blend of creamed butter and powdered sugar) French buttercream can be slightly fussy. Both extremely light and exceedingly silky, it falls into the same family as meringue-based Swiss and Italian meringue buttercreams. The crucial difference is that French buttercream is made with whole eggs—egg whites and yolks, but mostly yolks—whipped with hot sugar syrup into a concoction known as pâte à bombe. The result is a buttercream with more body than its brethren, a brighter yellow hue, and an extra-rich, custardy taste.

A candy thermometer is nonnegotiable here; the sugar syrup must reach an exact temperature (230°F) for the buttery frosting to achieve the right texture. Use cold, not room temperature, butter for this frosting recipe; the cold butter will best emulsify for a shiny, smooth end product. It’s essential to add the butter piece by piece—if you dump it in all at once, the butter won’t combine properly with the whipped egg yolks, and you’ll end up with a “broken” buttercream. You’ll be able to identify this easily—it’ll be a chunky, watery hot mess. If your buttercream does break, however, there is a fix: Turn the mixer to medium-high speed and add more cold butter, piece by piece, until it comes back together.

Often used as a filling for macarons, French buttercream can also be used to sandwich cookies (try it with molasses cookies or oatmeal cookies), frost cupcakes, or paired with any of our favorite layer cake recipes. Feel free to add vanilla extract (or, better, the scraped seeds of a vanilla bean) or any other flavoring (instant coffee! Dutch cocoa! peanut butter! lemon curd!), or food coloring in the form of gels, powders, or pulverized freeze-dried fruit.

This recipe was adapted for style from ‘Robicelli’s: A Love Story, With Cupcakes,’ by Allison and Matt Robicelli. Buy the full book on Amazon.