Gluten Free Vanilla Butter-cream

My famous vanilla butter-cream. You can add to this to change the flavours.

250g Butter

500g Icing Sugar

1-2 Tbsp Milk (start with 1, especially in summer)

1 TBsp Vanilla Extract

Butter is beaten for about 7 minutes (or more) until pale and smooth, icing is added in 1/3 lots adding milk and vanilla in between additions.

Food safe colours (Wilton or Americolour) can be added for the right colour, double check the Wilton as some of them are not gluten free.

Buttercream can be piped or spread on top of cupcakes or a whole cake. It can also be used to cover a cake before adding a fondant layer on top.

To Make Chocolate Icing, just add 1-2 Tbsp of cocoa powder to the mixture at the end, or more if you like, I just keep adding it until in tastes right to me. I had one person tell me they added mint to it and made choc mint cupcakes.

If you want to use really fruit juice, don't add the milk, use juice instead. I have made this with lemon icing and used this on top of lemon cupcakes. So yummy.

I have made delicious coffee flavoured icing in the past, I used real coffee, that I left to cool, in place of Vanilla. I have a pod machine so I just made an espresso before I started the butter cream so it had time to cool.