Icing Troubles

The raspberry icing has given me so much trouble. I have made three attempts at raspberry buttercream icing, and all three have failed. Luckily one is edible, but the other two are still sitting in the fridge waiting for me to figure out a way to salvage them. The first icing I made, I simply took powdered sugar, lemon juice and raspberries. I should have left it like that. But I didn’t. I guess I wanted something creamier instead of a glaze, even though the glaze was great honestly.

So after eating a cupcake with the glaze on it, I decided to turn it into buttercream. Little did I know then, that you have to cream the butter and sugar first, you can’t cream a raspberry glaze with butter. So I ended up with a separated raspberry butter mess. I then wanted to try again, but I was out of powdered sugar. Oh the frustration.

So I just found a recipe online that didn’t ask for powdered sugar. You are supposed to heat flour and sugar and milk on the stove and mix it with butter. I don’t know how that recipe is supposed to work, because I tried it, and it came out the same as the raspberry mess, it was just a separated mess. I ended up folding that mess into whipped cream. That tasted good that day, it was a whipped sugary vanilla cream, so I liked it. But once in the fridge, it has separated somehow and tastes grainy and not good.

Then I got some powdered sugar, and mixed it with butter and it was going just like it should. Then I got to the step of adding raspberries, and I ran into trouble once more. I am using real raspberries and it seems like they just don’t mix well with buttercream. This is the only icing that is edible, and it is ok, but it doesn’t spread very well and doesn’t have a great consistency. It just tastes good. I guess I am either never going to make raspberry buttercream icing, or I am going to use a syrup or jelly for the taste, not real raspberries.