How long cream butter and sugar

Butter that is too cold won't expand very easily and it'll never capture much air. The result? Heavy and dense, the creamed butter will resemble chunky, grainy spread the consistency of natural peanut butter.

There's also little or no change in color. Properly creamed butter and sugar will be pale yellow in color, but not white more on this later. If the butter is too soft or melted, the air bubbles will be created but then will collapse again. This causes a greasy, wet mixture that will result in heavy, soggy cakes.

Any air bubbles you've managed to create will also be knocked out as soon as the eggs and flour are added. Notice how smeared the mixture is around the edge of the bowl. This makes it much harder for it to incorporate into the other ingredients, too.

You have to repeatedly scrape down the bowl as the oilier butter resists releasing from the bowl. As a side note, this is also what happens if you try to cream oil and sugar. Leave the oil for recipes that don't call for the creaming method. Now that we've seen both extremes, let's check out the results when the butter is at the right temperature. There we have it. The mixture is lightened in color, it's visibly fluffy, and it's not clinging to the sides of the bowl. Let's look at the three results side by side.

Starting on the left: too cold and the mixture sits in a lump. Too warm, and the mixture spreads out and has an oily layer. Finally, properly creamed, the mixture sits up tall and has visible fluffy peaks. Besides looks, the feel of each mixture will be different as well. Under-creamed and your mix will feel like wet sand or damp cornmeal.

Over-creamed, and your mix will have the feel of oil and sugar on your fingers, rather like a facial scrub. Your well-creamed mix will be moist and light and the sugar will be nearly dissolved.

You'll barely feel any grit when you rub it between your fingers. Of course, having the softened butter is just one part of the equation, albeit a big one. Mixing at too high or too low a speed and for too short or long a time will also wreak havoc with your creaming.

With the advent of the more powerful stand mixers that we use today, gone are the days of having to whip the butter and sugar mixture on high speed for several minutes to achieve good results. Instead, a moderate speed typically speed on a stand mixer for 2 to 3 minutes is sufficient to get the aeration you're looking for.

In the photo above, the softened butter and sugar were beaten together at high speed 10 on our KitchenAid stand mixer for 5 minutes. You can see it's nearly pure white compared to the original color of the butter used. Sorry, fellow bakers, if it's gone this far there's no going back. If you've ever had dense, gummy streaks in your cake , this is your culprit: over-creaming.

A member of our Baker's Hotline team , pastry chef JoAnn, recommends saving it, though, by adding some cinnamon or other favorite spice and using it for a sweet spread on your toast, pancakes, or strata.

We hope you've found this information helpful. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, and we hope these photos and our video will help you achieve the cakes and bakes of your dreams. MaryJane Robbins grew up in Massachusetts and moved to Vermont 20 years ago.

After teaching young children for 15 years, she changed careers and joined King Arthur Flour in In this instance, creamed butter is what we call a physical leavener as opposed to a chemical leavener like baking soda and baking powder. Creaming butter with sugar also helps to dissolve the sugar in the butter. Once the sugar is blended evenly into the butter, it will be evenly dispersed throughout the batter, so creaming helps blend ingredients evenly.

The key to creaming butter properly is to start out on the right foot, and that right foot is making sure your butter is the right temperature.

So, take the time to let the butter come to the right temperature. The way to do that is to leave it out on the counter for an hour or so. When the butter is the right temperature, you should be able to press on it with your finger and leave an indentation easily.

Leaving the butter in a warm spot like near the oven or on the stovetop will warm it too much from the outside in. You can also microwave a bowl of water for a few minutes, and then remove the bowl of water and let the butter sit in the warmed microwave. The best way, however, is just to wait for the butter to warm naturally. Once your butter is at the right temperature, you can start to cream it.

Give the beaters just a couple of spins around the bowl with the butter on its own and then the sugar will stick to the butter more easily. You should expect to beat the butter and sugar together for at least 2 to 3 minutes on medium speed. First of all, the butter should become light and fluffy — it will feel lighter when you scrape it with a spatula or pick the beaters up out of the bowl.

Now, I should let you know that it is possible to over-beat butter. Unfortunately, if this happens to you, the only recourse is to start again with new butter. When you just want a basic vanilla layer cake, this is your go-to recipe. You can decorate it with buttercream View Recipe. The perfect blueberry muffin with a high crown and a moist center is a snack to behold!

Here are a I agree! They start with a simple box of dark chocolate Air is almost impossible to visualize, even when you're looking at it. Watching butter and sugar as they're creamed together is about as dramatic as sorting through shades of beige at Sherwin-Williams. But it's really, really not, and with the help of some blue food coloring, the minute-by-minute transformation becomes clear. When you first mix butter and sugar together, they have the heavy and dense texture of wet sand.

After a minute of creaming at medium speed, the paste begins to feel more like clay—damp and compact, but still not very sticky. Another minute, and it begins to soften, clinging to whatever it touches.

From there, the network of sugar and air continues to stretch and grow. When properly creamed, my sugar cookie dough can be divided into 26 two-tablespoon portions, weighing one ounce each. When the ingredients are simply mixed together without that creaming step, the number drops to 21, at a heavier 1. And before you shrug, remember this: They're not bigger cookies, they're denser cookies.

Those dense lumps behave very differently on a hot baking sheet in the oven. For starters, they conduct heat better, which means that the butter and sugar melt faster, spreading the cookies flatter and thinner. On top of that, the tightly packed dough traps the carbon dioxide produced by leavenings like baking soda and baking powder.

With nowhere to go, those pockets of air don't just gently lift the cookies; they smash their way through them. Cream the butter and sugar properly, though, and the cookie dough will be loaded with micro pockets of air.

That air is a poor conductor of heat, which means that it helps insulate the dough from the hot baking sheet in the oven, slowing the rate at which the butter and sugar melt. Meanwhile, those air pockets begin to swell with steam, a gentle upward draft that helps hold the dough aloft.

When the cookie finally sets, the air's footprint forms its crumb. The extent to which you experience the effect of those air pockets depends on a comical number of variables. Did you use a hand mixer or a stand mixer? What was the horsepower? Did the butter come to room temperature?

What is room temperature? Where do you live? How many lights are there? Ultimately, it's a game of averages. That's why so many recipes keep things vague with instructions like "room-temperature" butter or mixing until "light and fluffy" without any indication of time or temperature.

By providing flexible parameters, recipes can guide you to your destination with a reasonable amount of success, while leaving you to sort out the details of your journey. That's all well and good in most cases, but what if you want a more expert grasp on how, exactly, light and fluffy should all work?

Here are the rules of creaming you really need to know. If you're looking for advice on how to go low-tech with elbow grease alone, you're asking the wrong Cylon. Unless you're built like The Rock, the amount of stamina and horsepower needed to truly cream like a pro will most likely be beyond you.

It's also beyond the threshold of boredom most of us can tolerate.