Although it is a ‘old’ recipe that is no longer widely used, brown butter frosting is excellent. As long as you are cautious not to burn the butter, it is simple to make. If you want to top brownies, use this icing.
| Prep Time: | 10 mins |
| Cook Time: | 5 mins |
| Total Time: | 15 mins |
| Servings: | 10 |
| Yield: | 10 servings |
Ingredients
- ¼ cup butter
- 2 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar
- 2 tablespoons milk, or more as needed
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
- Heat butter, stirring constantly, in a saucepan over medium-low heat until it browns and becomes very aromatic, 5 to 10 minutes. Whisk confectioners’ sugar into butter until dissolved and remove saucepan from heat; stir in milk and vanilla extract.
- Beat butter mixture using an electric mixer until frosting is smooth; add more milk if frosting is too thick.
- Make sure to stir butter continuously while heating and be very careful to not burn the butter – if you do, start over again with new butter.
- If you are not using the frosting immediately, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate so it does not dry out.
Reviews
I didn’t want to keep adding milk so i added marshmallow fluff to make it spreadable. My sweetie loves marshmallow. I used it to frost pumpkin spice cookies. We like it. I’m going to try it on Christmas cookies this year
Delicious! And dangerous. In a literal browning-butter-pops-and-spits-and-burned-my-hand kinda way. It took a few days for the blister to heal. I ended up with very dark brown butter as I ran off to deal with my wounds while the burner was still going. The butter even looked a bit burned. But once I was all patched up, I finished the recipe (as written) and it came out great. Good texture, good flavor. Will make again. With oven mitts. And a long spoon. Maybe some protective goggles.
The challenge with this recipe was that there wasn’t nearly enough butter to absorb all of the sugar. So, I added a lot more milk than it called for. When the frosting cooled, it came out fairly hard, like a fondant that was difficult to spread.
This has been my favorite flavored frosting for years and this recipe did not disappoint. My granddaughter used it to make my birthday cake. It was absolutely delicious!
This recipe was a great jumping-off point! I didn’t have enough confectioners sugar so I just used what I had. The texture was a little weird (I think because I didn’t have enough sugar) so I used half + half instead of milk and whipped it in my KitchenAid until it was fluffy. I added a little salt and a bunch of cinnamon for a snickerdoodle kind of taste– it was great on top of a pumpkin chocolate cake! I’d like to try it again as written sometime when I have all the ingredients!
This is delicious frosting, but the recipe is not enough to frost a whole cake, only a pan of brownies maybe. Double the recipe if you want to do a whole cake.
Perfect as is! I used this as frosting on my banana bread.
This was good and really easy to make. I used a bit more butter (about 1/3 cup) and 1/4 cup milk. It was really sweet to taste by itself but worked really well on the butter pecan cake I made.
I like very view icing, but this one is good. Tastes like maple fudge.
Awesome! Great on cinnamon rolls