Easy Vegan Buttercream Frosting

I made this (regular vegan butter coconut oil base) to ice my < href="http://chocoholicphilosopher.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/happy-birthday-hunter-vegan-vanilla.html">husband's birthday cake yesterday. It tasted amazing! The apple cider vinegar is genius, it gave the icing a wonderfully complex balance of flavours. However, I found that it was very sweet even with just half of the recommended sugar. Maybe that's an Australian thing. It also didn't do too well at holding strawberries on top of my slightly domed sponge cake, but that might have been due to the reduced sugar content affecting the stiffness.

Also, I didn't sift my icing sugar, and then found it difficult to get the lumps out. Perhaps the instructions could be updated to specify sifting, even though most people would probably do this automatically? I'm lazy, and also have no experience with icing, and so it didn't occur to me to sift the icing sugar

As an aside, I used this to decorate a sponge cake, and although Google brings up veganbaking.net as a result for vegan sponge cakes, when I try to access the page, it says "Please check the widget code and install again". Do you actually have a sponge cake recipe Mattie? The one I ended up using was OK, but not brilliant, and I suspect that yours would be better.

Wow, this is fantastic. I am terrible at making frosting and this turned out great. Thanks for the great recipe. It's light, fluffy, and doesn't slop everywhere.

Hi-
My daughter wants "apricot frosting" on her birthday cake. One of our guests is dairy and gluten free. Could we add apricot preserves or something similar to this recipe to get apricot frosting?
Thanks for any help!

Hi Mattie!

I made your white chocolate vegan butter to use in this buttercream to make a white chocolate buttercream (as such, I omitted the vinegar). However, I found that my white chocolate butter was very very hard straight out of the fridge, and whipping it at that temperature was not easy. Baking was never a big thing around my house, so I trusted the fridge temp instructions -- I broke it down into hard lumps, but couldn't get it to cream. I then added the other ingredients and it got more buttercreamy but there were still hard lumps of cocoa butter. Eventually I basically put the whole mix on low heat in a pan to melt the lumps and it seems to have worked. I don't have much experience with buttercream so I don't know if I'm missing the texture, but everyone who consumed it was happy, so good enough.

Basically, I was just wondering whether the fridge temperature instruction needs to be adjusted for cocoa butter/letting anyone else who has rock-hard cocoa butter butter know they should probably adjust the temperature.

The taste is really good, but the vinegar kind of throws it off a bit. The smell is overpowering (at least to my kids), can we make without it? Would it still be successful? Not sure what it brings to the recipe other than maybe the flavor? We had to eliminate the use of the almond extract as well, so I am not sure if that also plays a part in why it is such a strong scent?
My kids just cannot see beyond the smell, and this is really for them (allergies).

Help!

Hi Mattie - This is amazing, I am blown away seriously. Tastes is so creamy and light. I used this frosting to make a faux hostess cupcake and the crowd went wild. Thanks for the top on the ice cube trays too, I've been looking for something to hold my vegan butter for. On the now. Thank you.

I am planning on trying your cocoa based recipe next but was wondering if I could add xanthan gum to make this frosting a bit stiffer? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

All the best,
Mayra

Wow, this frosting is so good! I love the complexity that the salt and vinegar add to the taste. It's still sweet with a very mild tang, almost like a cream cheese (from what I remember of the taste of cream cheese). As far as buttercreams go it is not very stiff (as pictured), but firming it up in the fridge does the trick. Very delicious.