Peppermint Buttercream

How to make delicious, smooth peppermint buttercream. Perfect for adding a festive twist to your cupcakes, layer cakes or macarons.

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Welcome to day 2 of Festive Buttercream Week, the week (that I made up) to celebrate all things smooth, delicious and perfect for piping onto cupcakes.

Today’s buttercream flavour is peppermint, which is served here on my yummy chocolate cupcakes. Not only is it delicious, but it’s also the perfect buttercream choice if you’re planning on getting a Christmas kiss under the mistletoe 😘.

I was in a bit of a dilemma what colour to make this buttercream and in the end I decided to go for minty green. However, if you prefer you could keep it natural (a similar colour to my vanilla buttercream) or paint red stripes on the inside of your piping bag to give a red and white candy cane effect.

I’ve topped mine with some crushed candy canes. One little word of warning, if you’re going to do this you want to add the candy canes just before serving. I found that the colour started to bleed into the green, making them look a bit messy when I left them overnight.

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Peppermint Buttercream

How to make delicious, smooth peppermint buttercream. Perfect for adding a festive twist to your cupcakes, layer cakes or macarons.

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Active Time: 5 minutes minutes

Total Time: 5 minutes minutes

Servings: 12 servings

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INGREDIENTS

Metric - US Cups/Ounces

• 250 g unsalted butter - soft at room temperature
• 500 g icing sugar
• ½ tsp peppermint extract
• Approx. 1 tbsp milk - I use skimmed but any is fine
• A little green food colouring - optional

INSTRUCTIONS

• Cut the butter (250g) into cubes (about 1″) and beat in an electic mixer on a low speed until soft.
• Add the icing sugar (500g) and beat until fully combined – I prefer to add the sugar a couple of spoonfuls at a time as this minimises the amount of sugar that flies out all over the kitchen! You’ll find that at first it’ll start to look lumpy but keep persevering and it’ll smooth out.
• Add the peppermint extract (½ tsp) and mix until fully combined.
• Is you buttercream soft enough to pipe? If not add ½ tsp milk and mix until fully combined. Check the consistency and repeat until it is just perfect.
• Add a little green food colouring (if you’d like to) and mix everything together until it’s fully combined. Remember you can always add more but you can’t take it away so add a little at a time.
• Once you’ve got the icing to the right consistency – have fun piping, spreading, or just licking if off the spoon!

NOTES

Take a look at my mix-and-match cupcake index to find a range of delicious cupcake sponges to pipe this buttercream onto, as well as all my other buttercream recipes.

⚖️ For best results, I recommend using the metric measurements rather than US cups as measurement will be more accurate. For more information about the US cups conversions please take a look at my interactive grams to cups calculator.

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NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION

Calories: 277kcal | Carbohydrates: 36g | Protein: 0.1g | Fat: 14.7g | Saturated Fat: 9.3g | Sugar: 35.9g

Any nutritional information provided is the estimated nutritional information per serving. Please refer to my guide to Charlotte’s Lively Kitchen nutritional information if you would like to learn more about how this is calculated.

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Author: Charlotte Oates

This is the estimated nutritional information per serving. Please refer to my guide to Charlotte’s Lively Kitchen nutritional information if you want to learn more about how this is calculated.