Brown Butter Is The Secret Ingredient For A Fall-Inspired Icing

Talk to any chef, and they'll sing the praises of brown butter. Brown butter is butter that has been cooked down so the milk solids become nice and toasted. The results are a nutty flavor and deep brown caramel color that is irresistibly delicious. You should be using brown butter in both savory and sweet dishes. One sweet way to use browned butter is to enhance a simple frosting.

Brown butter frosting takes vanilla frosting to the next level with flavors reminiscent of the holiday season. Since browned butter is inherently warm and nutty, it's the perfect celebratory flavor for autumn. To avoid a brown butter frosting pitfall, make sure it's completely cool before adding it to your cream cheese and butter mixture. The best approach is to let it sit on the counter until it solidifies before adding it to the mixer with other room-temperature ingredients. Of course, you'll want to use a stainless steel pan to cook brown butter.

You can make several different frostings with browned butter, including a classic cream cheese or buttercream frosting. Since brown butter has a golden brown hue with specs of dark brown, adding it to frosting gives a speckled appearance. While the frosting can be splattered all over a chocolate or vanilla cake, using it to frost a pumpkin layer cake or apple cinnamon cookies seems more festive.

With brown butter, there's never enough of a good thing. Why stop at the frosting when you can add brown butter to cookies or cake batter? The rich, nutty flavor will be more pronounced and delicious in the batter and spread on top. For those who don't have time to make an entire batch of frosting, whipped brown butter is a simple stand-in. Whipped brown butter is exactly what it sounds like, and though it doesn't have the added butter or sugar like frosting, it is easily spreadable. It won't be as sweet as frosting but will still be a yummy addition to a naked cookie or cake.