How To Use Butter To Improve Store-Bought Frosting

If you're baking a homemade cake, you may want to save time and energy by using store-bought frosting instead of making your own. Unfortunately, store-bought frosting does not taste as good as its homemade counterpart. Luckily, there are some tricks we can do to elevate it, including mixing in a common kitchen ingredient: butter.

By mixing butter into store-bought frosting, you'll make the frosting a bit fluffier, which will give it more of a homemade feel. Plus, if you think that store-bought frostings are typically too sweet, the butter will help undercut that sweetness and balance it out. Start by making sure that the butter is at room temperature. Then, combine two tablespoons of butter with a 16-ounce can of store-bought frosting in a bowl with a stand mixer using the whisk attachment until the mixture is smooth and thoroughly combined.

After mixing, give the frosting a taste — if it's still too sweet, you can add more butter to balance out the taste. Start with another tablespoon or, to be safe, ½ tablespoon and go from there. However, while adding butter will impact the taste and help make the textures a bit fluffier, it won't actually make the frosting thicker. If you're looking for a thicker consistency, you'll have to resort to an additional tactic, such as adding powdered sugar to the store-bought frosting.

Adding butter will go a long way toward making a can of store-bought frosting taste a little bit more homemade, but it's far from the only tactic to do so. For example, even if you don't have any butter on hand to add to the mixture, simply whipping the frosting on its own (using a stand mixer with a whisk attachment) will make a difference in fluffing up the texture. Or, if you don't mind adding flavor to the frosting, there are certain ingredients you can add that will make the texture creamier while also elevating the taste. These ingredients include peanut butter, cream cheese, or Nutella. Break out the stand mixer again and add eight ounces of room temperature cream cheese or ½ cup of peanut butter or Nutella to combine with a can of store-bought frosting.

It also doesn't hurt to start with the best possible store-bought frosting out there to ensure you're working with a good base when you make these upgrades. For that, check out our ranking of nine store-bought chocolate frostings and go from there the next time you need help finishing your homemade cake.