The Fluffiest Caramel Buttercream Frosting

This caramel buttercream frosting is super fluffy and ready to pipe in only 5 minutes! Made with only a few simple pantry ingredients, this icing is perfectly sweet to top your favorite cakes and cupcakes.

Where are all my caramel friends? Get ready for this buttercream frosting recipe because it is just SO fluffy and delicious.

I love to pipe this buttercream on top of these super easy to make caramel cupcakes, and these chocolate cupcakes and will sometimes swap out my cream cheese buttercream recipe or coffee buttercream frosting for this luscious topping instead!

Ingredients needed

Since this is an American buttercream frosting you only need a few pantry staples you probably already have in your house.

This caramel icing is made only of unsalted butter, confectioners sugar, caramel sauce, and small amounts of milk and salt.

• Unsalted Butter– this will need to be at room temperature. If you forget to soften your butter I have a whole post on how to soften butter quickly.
• Powdered Sugar– AKA confectioners sugar, or 10x as we called it when I was training at Le Cordon Bleu
• Caramel sauce– Homemade caramel sauce, or store bought is fine!
• Milk– any kind
• Kosher salt– you can add as much or as little as you want

How to make caramel buttercream

1. First decide if you will be using homemade caramel sauce or store bought, either is fine!
2. With a hand or stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter on low speed for 1-2 mins. Stop the the mixer then add in the 10x ( were just gonna call it this from now on and you can feel fancy that you call it this!) Mix on low working up to medium speed and mix for 2 minutes.
3. Add in the caramel sauce with the mixer on low speed.
4. Add in the milk and salt. Mix on medium for 2 minutes and you’re done!

Store bought vs homemade caramel

It really doesn’t matter. If you have store bought caramel in the fridge go for it. If you want to make your own then go for that too! You can even melt down some of those caramel candies and use those as well. So many options!

Yield of recipe

This caramel frosting recipe makes enough to frost 12 cupcakes, 1 9×13 inch sheet cake, or fill and frost a 2 layer 8″ cake

Storage & Freezing

I like to store my buttercream in plastic wrap and either keep it on the counter if I am using it the next day or in the freezer if I am making it in advance. It does not have to be refrigerated if you make it up to 3 days in advance.

Otherwise you can freeze the icing in plastic wrap for up to 3 months. Defrost in the fridge and give it another whirl in the stand mixer before you use it.

Tips for recipe success

Honestly this type of buttercream is really hard to mess up. If it looks too runny, you just add a bit more 10x to thicken it up. If it looks too dry, add a little bit more milk (1 tsp) at a time to loosen it.

Usually when I am not baking for the blog, I don’t even measure my ingredients because all I really care about is the texture of it, and you can tweak it just by looking and tasting it!

Last thing, make sure to keep your butter at room temperature for it to cream well!

Ways to use this recipe

• On chocolate cake
• In between these salted caramel chocolate chip cookies (ermagersh can you imagine)
• Pipe it on top of this salted caramel cheesecake
• On top of these mini cheesecake bites!

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