Help With A Frosting Recipe

[suziq0805]

My son's 2nd birthday party is coming up soon and I need help with a recipe for frosting that tastes good. It needs to be gluten, dairy and soy free but yet taste "normal". I love buttercream icing...is there a way to get that taste and texture without the butter? I've searched online and see that you can take Wilton's recipe and substitute more shortening for the butter. Has anyone tried that and if so how much does it change the taste?

For milk- would you recommend rice milk or almond milk. I have some McCormick's butter flavoring and was wondering if adding that would help get the buttercream taste.

[Skylark]

I've done buttercream with shortening when I needed perfectly white icing. It has the same texture but the butter flavor is lacking. The butter flavoring should do the trick. I'd reach for almond milk for icing because the light almond flavor is so nice in baked goods.

[Kelleybean]

I haven't had luck with shortening for "buttercream" - for me the texture and taste was way off. Although in hindsight that may be because I didn't add enough sugar. I'm pretty sure that the Earth Balance butter sticks are free of all the allergens you listed so you can use that for the butter. What about chocolate frosting? I've done the chocolate icing off of the Spunky Coconut website (the one listed with the vanilla bean cake with the melted chocolate and coconut milk) and it's really good. I used Enjoy Life chocolate chips. I've also done a "whipped cream" topping similar to this: Open Original Shared Link It uses coconut milk.

There are also recipes out there that use soaked nuts like cashews.

[maximoo]

Betty crocker frostings are gluten-free at least the chocolate one is. You can chk the labels if you want a different flavor.

[mommida]

What about orange juice instead of the "milk" liquid? I am trying to find the recipe if you are interested.

[RiceGuy]

Depending upon the temperature, I suppose coconut oil may work for the fat, but it does have a lower melting point than butter. So it may not work quite like it would need to for your purposes.

I think some of the other suggestions for things other than a butter cream frosting may be a better solution, although the Earth Balance buttery sticks do have a nice flavor, so might suffice.

[suziq0805]

Thanks for the suggestions. A buttercream-like frosting is what I would idealy like because I'll be decorating with it and coloring it red, black, orange and yellow. I'm going to make some super cute Elmo cupcakes for him to take to daycare so gotta be able to make Elmo red. And his birthday party is going to be Mickey Mouse and I'll be making a cake with marshmallow fondant. The buttercream frosting texture is nice for decorating cupcakes and holding the fondant to the cake. I love decorating cakes and am just determined to make this work still while working around the food intolerances, but this is the first time not being able to use a "normal" buttercream frosting.

[mommida]

I think you will find it won't be that hard to figure out. Sugar, some type of fat, and liquid is pretty straight forward about making something tasty.

Stick with it!

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the Allergen-free baker's handbook How to bake without gluten, wheat, dairy, eggs, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame by Cybele Pascal

The orange buttercream frosting recipe is in this book too.