Chocolate Ermine Frosting: Your New Go-To Chocolate Icing

Chocolate Ermine Frosting

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is an old-fashioned less sweet buttercream frosting that tastes like chocolate pudding and spreads and pipes like a dream. Like classic Ermine Frosting, it makes for a beautiful filling for things like Oatmeal Cream Pies, Pumpkin Oatmeal Cream Pies or a topping for your favorite Vanilla Sheet Cake or as a less-sweet topping for Texas Sheet Cake.

Taste	Texture
Chocolate, buttery	Silky, fluffy, delicate

Active time	Total time	Yield	Difficulty
10 minutes	30 minutes	Frosting for a 9×13 cake	Easy

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Why Chocolate Ermine Frosting Is So Good

1. Double Chocolate: With cocoa in the chocolate pudding base and added chocolate chips, this frosting has deep double chocolate flavor.
2. Less Sweet: Unlike powdered sugar based frostings, chocolate ermine frosting

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   gets its sweetness from chocolate chips and a small amount of sugar, making it a nice alternative for people who don’t love extra sweet frostings. The flavor complements the finished baked good you add it to instead of fighting with it.
3. Velvety and Fluffy: The cooked flour base for ermine frosting

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   makes for an extra light and fluffy frosting. The sugar dissolves completely for a velvety smooth taste that is light on your tongue instead of heavy.
4. Easy to Use: This frosting pipes into gorgeous swirls and smooths onto cakes without any drama.
5. No Starchy Flavor: The uncooked starch in the powdered sugar in American buttercream is not my personal favorite for the “coated” feel it leaves on your tongue. In contrast, the cooking process breaks down any raw starch taste in ermine frosting, leaving you tasting smoothness, not starchiness.

The Many Names of Ermine Frosting

Ermine frosting is an old-fashioned cake topping make with cooked flour mixed with sugar and milk into a roux, like you would for gravy. This makes the frosting an emulsion-based frosting where a liquid base of some sort is gradually added to butter and whipped until the two come together.

Ermine frosting has been around since the original red velvet cake was a thing in the late 1800s. It’s cheap to make, only requiring pantry ingredients with no eggs. Additionally, it’s the easiest cooked buttercream frosting to make.

Other names for ermine include cooked flour frosting, boiled milk frosting, and old-fashioned frosting; all refer to the fact that this frosting is made with a thickened eggless pudding base made with milk, flour, and sugar.

What is the Best Chocolate to Use for Chocolate Ermine Frosting?

My chocolate ermine buttercream uses 2 forms of chocolate in both cocoa and chocolate chips for a rounded, more nuanced chocolate flavor. I include chocolate chips instead of a chocolate bar both for price and ease of use. Not everybody can get good quality chocolate bars, but we can all find decent chocolate chips. Chocolate chips are more cost-effective, so therefore more likely to be in our pantries. Here’s my two cents on what to use:

1. Cocoa: Use a high quality cocoa, either natural or Dutch process; do not use a cocoa drink mix, which has added sugar and other ingredients you don’t need. I love the rich chocolate flavor of Droste or Hershey’s Special Dark (both Dutch process), though regular Hershey’s is good too.
2. Chocolate: Semi-sweet chocolate chips are ultra convenient and cost effective vs. chocolate bars. That being said, I’d happily use good quality milk or dark chocolate bars (60-70%) like Milka, Lindt, Theo, or Ghiradelli.

At the end of the day, the best part about ermine frosting is that it is a pantry recipe, so USE WHAT YOU HAVE!

How to Make Chocolate Ermine Frosting

1. Make the Roux: Mix flour, cocoa, espresso powder

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   , and granulated sugar together in a wide skillet. Add in the milk and whisk everything together over medium-low heat until the roux starts to thicken. When the flour starts to pull away from the bottom of the skillet, it is thick enough. The roux should be glossy and like a thick chocolate pudding.
2. Cool the Pudding: Scrape the chocolate roux into a pie plate

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   , smoothing it into a thin layer. Spritz a piece of plastic wrap with cooking spray and place the plastic oiled side down right on the surface of the pudding. Put the pie plate

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   in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes. When you can put your hand on top of the plastic and feel no warmth from the pudding, you’re ready to move on.
3. Melt the Chocolate: Measure the chocolate chips into a small cup. Microwave them until they are just melted, stirring every 30 seconds. They should take 90 seconds to 2 minutes total. Set aside the chocolate to cool.
4. Make the Buttercream: Beat the butter in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment or in a mixing bowl with a hand mixer. When the butter is soft and smooth, add in the cooled pudding a little bit at a time. Continue to beat the frosting for about 30 seconds to 1 minute after you’ve added in all of the pudding. Add the vanilla and cooled chocolate and then beat for a few more seconds. The frosting should be light and fluffy but not too airy.
5. Use It!: You can pipe the frosting into glorious swirls or smooth it onto a cake from here, or use it to fill cookies like Oatmeal Cream Pies or Soft Chocolate Sandwich Cookies.

How to Troubleshoot Chocolate Ermine Buttercream

If you’re struggling with ermine frosting, the likely culprit is the temperature of the butter vs. the temperature of the pudding base. If you have an instant-read thermometer, the frosting will come together at about 70-73 degrees.

• Too Cold: If either the butter or the pudding is too cold, the frosting will look grainy.
  • Solution: Warm the frosting in the bowl over a bowl of hot water for a few seconds. Re-whip and evaluate.
• Too Hot: If either the butter or the pudding is too warm, the frosting will be loose and runny.
  • Solution: Set the frosting in the fridge and chill for a few minutes. Re-whip and evaluate.
• It Looks Like it Has Holes in It: This can happen when you’ve beaten too much air into the frosting. There’s two tricks to fix this:
  • Manual solution: Press the frosting on the sides of the bowl gently with a baking spatula

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    . You’ll see the little air bubbles go away after 10 or so strokes with your spatula.
  • Microwave solution: Scoop out 3-4 tablespoons of the frosting and melt it in a cup in the microwave. Turn your mixer back on and whip the melted frosting back into the frosting. If you need to chill it so that it holds its shape, do that, but this trick will make your buttercream ultra smooth.

Storing Chocolate Ermine Frosting

1. Fridge: Store leftover chocolate ermine frosting in a lidded container in the fridge for up to 1 week. Set it on the counter to warm up before whipping it again for a short time to bring back its texture.
2. Freezer: Scrape leftover chocolate ermine frosting into a plastic bag. Press out all the air and store in the freezer for up to 3 months. Simply defrost the frosting in the fridge overnight and rewhip it to bring back the fluffiness before using.

Recipes to Add Chocolate Ermine Frosting to

• Soft Chocolate Sandwich Cookies
• Oatmeal Cream Pies
• Pumpkin Oatmeal Cream Pies
• Vanilla Sheet Cake: Baked either as a sheet cake or simple vanilla cupcakes, this frosting will level up this cake without overpowering it with sweetness.
• Texas Sheet Cake: Chocolate ermine frosting is a great alternative for the extra sweet glaze in Texas sheet cake. Use this for a fluffier finish with less sweetness.

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