Best Mixer for Buttercream Frosting

Buttercream is a study in air. The best buttercream is silky, light enough to hold a piping ribbon, stable enough to sit on a cake in a warm room, and tinted with as much air as the butter will accept. The mixer’s job is straightforward but not trivial: incorporate air evenly, scrape the bowl thoroughly, and run long enough at the right speed to fluff the fat without breaking it.

Most home mixers can make buttercream. The difference between an adequate buttercream and a great one comes down to whisk geometry, bowl scraping, and speed control. Powerful mixers do not necessarily make better buttercream; controlled mixers do.

The speed story

Buttercream wants a slow start, a sustained medium-fast whip, and ideally a slow finish to release the largest air bubbles before piping. A mixer with only three speeds, or with steps that jump too aggressively from one to the next, makes the slow finish hard. Six speeds with smooth transitions and a soft-start gives you the granular control that turns good buttercream into great buttercream.

• Soft-start so cold butter does not jump and splatter at the beginning
• A genuinely slow first speed for adding sugar without a sugar cloud
• A medium-high range that whips without breaking the emulsion
• A balloon whisk geometry that captures and folds air evenly
• Reliable bowl scraping, either by tool design or by attentive baker

Bowl shape and the scraping problem

Buttercream’s nemesis is the unincorporated butter chunk lurking near the bowl wall. A round-bottom bowl with a whisk that sweeps close to the surface is far better at this than a flat-bottom bowl where butter can hide in the corners. Bowl-bottom drive mixers, with their tall narrow bowls and tools that ride close to the wall, scrape themselves more naturally than wide planetary bowls do.

You will still need to stop and scrape with a spatula at least twice during a serious batch. Any mixer that promises to scrape itself perfectly is overpromising; the discipline of stopping mid-batch is part of buttercream.

A quiet note on whisk choice

The wire density on the whisk matters more than people credit. A whisk with too few wires, or wires too thick, will whip slowly and leave the buttercream coarser than it should be. A balloon whisk with fine, dense wires aerates faster and produces a smoother result, especially in Swiss and Italian buttercreams where you are folding meringue into butter.

For bakers who do a lot of buttercream, a bowl-bottom mixer with a fine balloon whisk and careful speed work will outperform a more powerful planetary mixer running on autopilot. The mixer is only doing what you tell it to do.

Continue reading in Volume IV — Everyday Versatility.