Butter Cream and Keeping It Natural

One of the most common questions we get asked is why our butter cream is an ivory/cream colour and not white. So I thought I would tell you!

Background: I grew up in a small rural town in New Zealand, surrounded by amazing food and produce. They call it the Bay of Plenty.. and with good reason! There is dense bush land perfect for wild animals and hunting, great farm lands for dairy, sheep and orchards, estuaries and ocean beach full of seafood. Why am I telling you this? I guess this is what gives me my view on food.

I like to keep things natural where possible. So when we make our butter cream, I choose not to use whiteners. The product is called Titanium dioxide and if you do some basic research you will find that there is not a lot of information as to whether it is harmful to the body or not. But it is also the same product they use in paint, plastics and sunscreen. Butter is naturally a creamy yellow/ivory colour… so why change that? This same attitude goes towards all of our ingredients as much as possible. Our raspberry butter cream is made by cooking down raspberries and sugar, creating a beautiful puree that gives the flavour that extra boost. Our salted caramel butter cream is made using dulce de leche, which we have steamed condensed milk for hours, because nothing beats the real thing. Why use flavourings, when we can use the real thing?!

I will always remember the day I started working at what I thought would be my dream job, in my dream cake shop. It broke my heart to see that all of their cakes, “the best in Melbourne” were packet mix! I had trained and worked all these years as a chef, earn’t my jacket……To add water? No thanks! Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes the customer wants what the customer wants. If you want an Elsa blue cake, then that’s up to you! But at least you know that cake is made from scratch using Warnambool butter, filled with Lemon curd butter cream, made from locally sourced lemons. Where possible we will give you the best, and natural ingredients we can. But nothing makes me happier than turning buttercream an amazing fuchsia pink, purely by adding some black currant reduction. Want to add some colour to your cake? Petite Ingredients edible flowers, grown locally here in Victoria are stunning.

An alternative? I love to recommend royal icing instead of butter cream for people that are chasing that pure white look because it is white… without adding anything to it.

I recently taught a cake decorating class and one of my attendees said to me “ I’ve been to other cake classes and they use that white stuff” and my answer to her and to you now is, take what you want from this and feel free to order or make what you want and how you want. But this is me.