How to Choose the Right Type of Frosting for Your Wedding Cake (2024)

FAQs

What type of frosting is best for wedding cakes? ›

Fondant, a firm sugar icing, is perhaps one of the most popular wedding cake coatings. Why? Due to its clean, polished look, Tiffany MacIsaac of Buttercream Bakeshop says it's extremely versatile, meaning you can add on edible illustrations, sugar crystals and flowers, and other decorative elements.

Both Swiss Meringue Buttercream and Italian Meringue Buttercream are commonly used by professional bakers, with Swiss meringue being slightly more popular. Both these buttercreams are made by whipping granulated sugar and egg whites into a meringue and then whipping butter into that meringue.

Choose Italian meringue Buttercream if you:

need the stability to hold up very large layer cakes or intricate designs. This one performed very well in my heat and humidity tests. want a melt-in-your-mouth buttercream that is sweet with a lingering butter flavor.

Royal Icing: Royal icing is made from confectioners' sugar and egg whites or meringue powder. It dries to a hard finish, making it ideal for intricate piping work, delicate lace designs, or creating three-dimensional decorations.

Crusting buttercream (or frosting that lightly sets) is perfect if you need your frosting to keep its shape. You can use it for cake decorating, piping swirls on cupcakes or for making buttercream flowers.

Vanilla Cake

For most bakers, it's their top requested flavor, and that's all due to the versatility of this cake flavor and the possibilities for incorporating different fillings and frostings. Think of it as a delicious, blank canvas.

Buttercream is the most popular type of frosting largely because of its few ingredients and easy application. Classic buttercream requires beating butter into icing sugar until you reach a frosting consistency.

Buttercream frostings rely on the main ingredient of butter and will be the most common type of frosting you will find in a bakery.

Swiss Meringue buttercream is silky smooth and light. It's perfect if you're looking for a slightly less sweet buttercream. It is, however, more time consuming to make than American buttercream. Italian Meringue buttercream is the least sweet of the three.

The shiny, smooth covering on a wedding cake with pristine edges and delicate flowers is likely Swiss or Italian Meringue buttercream. There are others that are rich and creamy like pudding. They are all delicious but have their own personality and functions.

How do you keep buttercream from melting on a wedding cake? ›

To prevent buttercream from melting, keep it cool. Keep it cool when you're making it, using it, storing it or transporting it. If you're in an environment where YOU feel like things are a bit warm, well, your buttercream cake feels it too.

At room temperature, cream cheese frosting only lasts two hours, which is why it needs to be refrigerated if you don't want to waste leftovers. Cream cheese frosting will usually last in the refrigerator for up to a week, which gives you plenty of time to use it on various baked goods.

Let me explain, fondant (or sugar paste) is almost the default choice for wedding cakes, it's very popular in terms of design ideas and all the possibilities it opens up. It looks the neatest out of all choices and it's the base of most designs out there.

Swiss and Italian meringue buttercream is the best type of frosting to use for achieving a smooth surface as a base for piped work and to support sugar flowers. Its very soft surface makes it easy for cake decorators to draw small details and get clean edges converting the cake into a masterpiece.

Start by spreading a thin layer of frosting on the top of the cake with a large offset spatula, then spread additional buttercream around the sides of the cake. Once the cake layers are fully covered, use your bench scraper to smooth the frosting around the side of the cake.

Cakes covered with buttercream in cool conditions, can be kept for several days at room temperature but warm humid weather will create a melted mess. Simple #buttercream will form a crust because of its high sugar content, but it will remain lovely and soft on the inside.

“If the taste is a top priority, buttercream is probably the better choice,” Watson notes. “It is rich, creamy, and flavorful and can be customized with a wide range of ingredients to suit any taste.” But, Watson says, “if the cake's appearance is important and the cost is not a factor, fondant might be the way to go.