Has anyone ever substituted flour for cake flour in the crusting buttercream recipe?

ex. 1 c cake flour = 3/4 c flour with 2 tbs of cornstarch

Why would you be putting flour in icing??? Maybe I just misunderstood but crusting buttercream is an icing, never heard of flour in an icing.

my buttercream icing doesn't call for flour...

They use flour as a stabilizer.

OMG nevermind.

A tiny bit of flour can be used to cut the sweetness of icing. If you do that, use only a little - one tablespoon for a 6 cup recipe. I've done it before and it works, and you can't taste the flour. I used regular flour although that tip actually calls for cake flour, but I didn't have any so used what I had.

My opinion is, it's ICING, it's supposed to be sweet! LOL!

Deanna

yes, I've heard of using flour in BC.. tho' never done it myself (too much of a sugar fiend!)

cake flour and regular flour are not exactly the same (different glutten content and also the fineness of how they are ground -- cake much finer) -- so can't really say it would work. I'd be concerned you'd be able to "feel" the regular flour as due it being a coarser grind.

but then, the only way to know is to try. (and if you do...please do tell us what your experiment revealed)

No see there is a recipe on this site for crusting buttercream the faux fondant stuff. and it calls for 1/2 c cake flour. And I don't have any on hand, and I wanted to play around with this icing and see if it rocks or not haha.

i'm sure cake flour would work if the recipe calls for it...

not so sure regular flour would due to glutten and fineness of grind issues.

but then, we'll only know when someone gives it whirl and reports the results.

I did try it with the regular flour and regular Wilton crusting buttercream recipe, and didn't find a noticeable difference in the texture. There's very, very little flour in the recipe. I tablespoon in 6 cups of icing isn't much. It got eaten fine. I prefer it without the flour, though. I did it for a cake for people who needed a birthday cake but don't like sweets.

Deanna

Cool. Well this is going to have 8 tbs of flour and one tbs of cornstarch. I just got the white velvet cake made so it will be another hour or so. I need to make some kind of filling but I don't have too much on hand, and it being a holiday weekend, our one grocery store is going to be jam packed! haha.

But I'll let everyone know how it went. If you have any more suggestions, it would be much appreciated.

And thank you for all the help thus far

According to a substitution chart I have, you can substitute regular flour cake flour. I believe the chart is from S.Living. The measurements are like this:
for 1 C cake flour, substitute
1 C regular (all purpose) flour LESS 2 Tbs.

I don't know how much flour your recipe calls for since I've never made that kind, but would guess it to be much less than this ... ANyway, hope this helps a little.

It does indeed work the recipe calls for 1/2 c cake flour so i substituted 8 tbs of reg flour, and i did not use the cornstarch. It came out fine. The cake itself was a disaster. I would post the pic but its nothing fabulous

So now I'm onto trying my hand at MMF.

POST THE PICTURE, ANYWAY!!!
Don't wait until you think they're fabulous - you should see some of the mouth-dropping pictures that their creators think are horrible!
Then look at mine and laugh!

I have used reg. flour in an old recipe that I have. it works just fine I think it is a 1/4 cup to 2 lbs. of powdered sugar

I posted a pic of it on my profile.