Buttercream - do I have to use real butter??

[FusionChefGeoff]

I'm planning on a buttercream 'grass' that won't really be eaten and buttercream middle and crumb coating.

Butter is so expensive

Can I do it with baking margarine or will that not hold its shape for the piped grass??

Margarine is too soft, stork block (looks like butter, not the tub) is a good substitute as it is closest in texture to butter

Well I'm no cake decorating expert by any stretch but the best bit about buttercream is the butter!

You don't have to use it but you can tell in the taste and texture. Use butter for any that will be eaten and a hard margarine for what won't be perhaps.

Why won't the "grass" be eaten?

I know butter is expensive but it really is the only way to do it. Margarine or other soft spreads are too flimsy and taste too oily when made into buttercream.

Try Aldi or Lidl. They do cheap, pretty decent blocks of butter.

You can do it with stork just about but it tastes truly awful.

In Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s they sell ready made tubs of different coloured icing. Is cheaper than a block of butter and less hassle. They don’t taste as nice as buttercream- but pipe ok. They do have palm oil in though.

You won’t need that much butter. I wouldn’t scrimp on that front. But as an alternative you can use desiccated coconut and dye it green.

The buttercream I make is 2oz butter to 8oz sugar, and 1oz cocoa, and that will do the inside and top of an 8 inch cake.

So I wouldn't imagine you'd end up using more than a single pat anyway if you used that recipe?

I've always made it with Margarine block, tastes just fine.

Stork do a butter/marg mix in a tub which I use found it does the job nicely.

Haven't iced a cake for years but always used to do half/half butter/block Marg. As pp said, Aldi and Lidl are your friends.

@Nacreous is that not really sweet? It seems a lot of sugar compared to butter, I do the 1:2 ratio for butter:sugar and I know that some people use even less sugar than that as they find it too sweet (I find that fine though) but that tends to be the norm

The grass is on the cake board and not the actual cake so I might do that with hard margerine then do the cake with butter.

Thanks!

YES! Oh how gutted I’d be to eat a lovely bit of cake and discover the buttercream was marg or something.

Haven't used butter for years, I use Pure margarine and add a drop of vanilla essence.

tellmelts

Well it has a lot of cocoa in too, right, which makes it less sweet? But honestly I find it fine, even if I do a vanilla version, and my cakes have won competitions so I don't think it comes out wrong. I never ice the sides of my cake though, so maybe that makes a difference?

Honestly it's just the recipe my mum got off her mum so I've never really thought about it. A lot of people who eat my chocolate cake have told me the best they've ever eaten and the recipe gets given out pretty regularly. The cake I make is jolly moist though, so maybe I use less of it if it doesn't need to moisten the cake?