Raspberry French Buttercream Recipe (with fresh raspberry sauce)

Learn to make Raspberry French Buttercream from scratch! This homemade French buttercream is enhanced with raspberry sauce and is perfect for decorating elegant cakes, cupcakes, and more.

⭐ Why You’ll Love This Recipe 

You won’t find any fake extracts or food coloring in this Raspberry Buttercream recipe! Featuring traditional French buttercream ingredients, such as egg yolks, corn syrup, sugar, and butter, its signature flavor comes from a bright and tangy homemade raspberry sauce. The bright pink buttercream color and berrylicious flavor are absolutely divine!

This recipe came about at the request of a 9 year old birthday girl with excellent taste who dreamt about a festive berry buttercream cake! Since then, I’m always using this French raspberry buttercream recipe to frost cakes and orange chocolate cupcakes, make buttercream flowers, or use to sandwich between yuzu raspberry macarons and lemon lavender shortbread.

This delectable raspberry frosting is perfect for decorating a variety of cakes, cupcakes, and so much more. It pairs so well with any of the recipes listed below or you can use it in place of other types of frostings: Poppyseed Lemon Cake, Pastel Sugar Cookies, Mini Lemon Bundt cake recipe or Coconut Macarons!

❓ French buttercream vs. Italian buttercream

Both French and Italian meringue buttercreams are perfect choices when you need a smooth, silky, and stable frosting. While the two are made using very similar processes, all of the difference lies in the eggs.

Italian buttercream is made with sugar syrup, egg whites, and butter, while French buttercream is made the same way but with egg yolks. They both have a creamy, meringue-like texture, but egg yolks give French buttercream a custard-like color and consistency.

🧈 Tips for using butter in French Buttercream

When making French Buttercream it's essential that your butter is room temperature. This means that it is malleable and soft - if cutting with a butterknife, the knife should easily glide through the softened butter.

This being said, the result of this buttercream is naturally a pale yellow without the addition of raspberry puree. If you choose not to add any additional ingredients or gel food coloring and want a bright white buttercream, I would stick to using either Italian or Swiss Meringue buttercream, or combat the yellow with a touch of blue gel food coloring to cancel out the yellow hues (gotta love the magic of color theory!).

🥚 Rich with Egg Yolks

French buttercream saves the day when you are left with one too many egg yolks after making macarons, meringue, or other recipes that require a large number of egg whites.

Other egg yolk recipe examples are Hollandaise Sauce, Lemon Curd and Yuzu Chocolate Mousse! These are all recipes that require more than one egg yolk - when making an egg white heavy recipe I set aside my egg yolks and utilize them in some way rather than discarding them as they are liquid gold!

🍴Ingredients

• Raspberries - I like using frozen raspberries because it guarantees they were picked at their prime, but you can also use fresh raspberries.
• Lemon juice - A splash of lemon juice brightens up the berry flavors in the raspberry sauce.
• Egg yolks - I save the yolks for French buttercream frosting whenever I make egg white heavy recipes like chocolate macarons and swiss meringue buttercream.
• Sugar - Granulated sugar is best in French buttercream recipes and dissolves easily in the hot corn syrup.
• Corn syrup - Icings made with corn syrup remain stable and smooth when spread over baked goods.
• Unsalted Butter - Be sure to use unsalted, room temperature butter. 

📖 Step by Step Instructions

Raspberry buttercream frosting combines a simple raspberry sauce with homemade French buttercream. Here’s how it’s done:

Raspberry Sauce

Step 1: Prepare the raspberries. Place the frozen or fresh raspberries in a medium saucepan. On medium heat, start cooking the raspberries while pressing gently to break them down with a spatula.

Step 2: Make the raspberry sauce. Bring the raspberries to a boil on the stove until the raspberries have fully broken down and the juices have started to reduce. Remove from the heat and strain through a fine-mesh sieve, getting rid of the excess pulp and seeds. Finally, stir in lemon juice and allow to cool.

French Buttercream

Step 3: Whisk eggs and prepare the syrup. In the bowl of a stand mixer using a whisk attachment, whisk the egg yolks until they appear frothy and pale in color on medium speed - this should take about 5 minutes total. Add the corn syrup into a small saucepan, then cover with sugar. Heat on medium to high heat and stir gently until the sugar dissolves and the temperature reaches 238F. Immediately transfer the hot syrup to a glass measuring cup so that it does not continue to cook.

Step 4: Beat syrup and eggs together. Pour a small amount of syrup over the egg yolks and whisk together. Stop the mixer and add the remaining syrup, then continue to whisk on high until the mixture cools to room temperature. This should take about three to five minutes.

Step 5: Mix in the butter. Stop the mixer and using the paddle attachment, slowly add the butter in one tablespoon increments. Continue mixing on medium to high speed until the buttercream becomes light, aerated and smooth as pictured below. 

Step 6: Add the raspberry sauce. To finish, slowly pour in the raspberry sauce and mix to combine! Take a moment to scrape the sides of your mixing bowl and mix for another 30 seconds before you've finished! You can use the buttercream right away on all kinds of cakes and desserts or store it in the fridge/freezer to use at a later time.

👩🏻‍🍳 Expert Tips

• Dissolving the sugar - Make sure to stir the sugar and corn syrup mixture constantly to dissolve the sugar completely. If you skip this step, your frosting may end up with a grainy texture.
• Candy thermometer - Use a candy thermometer when heating the sugar syrup. It’s ready when it reaches 238ºF. 
• Room temperature butter - Soft, malleable butter is the key to making the best French buttercream.
• Raspberry buttercream with jam - Another way to enrich icing recipes with raspberry flavor is with raspberry jam. Instead of making raspberry sauce, grab a jar of your favorite seedless raspberry jam or preserves, and mix about a ¼ cup into your frosting. 

💭 Recipe FAQs

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