Ermine frosting really shines when you need a mild and beautiful accompaniment to something rich and dense, or if you’d just like heaps and heaps of frosting on a light and fluffy cake, but don’t want it to be overwhelmingly sweet or heavy. It’s is almost neutrally sweet, like a whipped cream… a rich, vanilla-mousse-whipped-cream. It’s billowy and downy and delightful. 

I certainly did not invent this recipe and I can’t remember now where or why I came across it, it was some years back, but it’s been a favorite of mine since then. 

Ermine frosting is an old-fashioned confection, dating back to the 1800’s and possibly earlier, made with a sweetened milk and flour pudding of sorts, that is cooled and then blended with whipped butter… I know that doesn’t sound all that appealing but stick with me!

 And apparently an ermine is a little white weasel… I don’t know, I’m confused too.

Confectionary Engineering

The brilliance of the method is this: by making a “pudding” with milk and flour, you don’t have to rely solely on butter and sugar for volume. 

Cream cheese frosting shares this virtue, but most traditional buttercream frostings are made primarily with butter and sugar, which sort of backs you into a corner when it comes to altering richness or sweetness. 

What’s more, you need use powdered sugar to achieve a smooth texture in a frosting. This might be too finnicky of me, but I’m going to say it… I don’t like powdered sugar. It smells weird. When it’s blended with butter or cream cheese the weirdness really dies down and I can get over it, but deep down I know it’s there, and I remember how it had smelled like a plastic bag from the dry cleaners. 

Not so with ermine, friends. Since we’re cooking the milk and flour, we can just use regular sugar (raw sugar for me), as it will dissolve in the heat anyway, negating the need for dry-cleaner powder. 

• Unrelated side note: I once needed powdered sugar for a glaze, so, in a spark of ingenuity, I poured sugar into my grain mill. It came out beautifully for all of two seconds before it began to shriek mortally and then jam up. There was no undoing it. I tried rice, I tried everything. It had immediately melted into an impermeable glass on the stones. It had to be fully dismantled and deeply cleaned with heat and thoroughly dried. Never. Ever. Again.

Ingredient Scrutiny

I should mention here, that while I exclusively bake with freshly milled whole grains in my breads and most other things, I do keep a bag of conventional all-purpose flour in the pantry for occasions such as this. Yes, I certainly could mill up 2/3 cup of flour, but for the sake of the pure and delicate nature of the frosting, and honestly, because this isn’t a *super healthy* item anyway, it’s just fine with me to use regular old flour. (I also keep it around for dusting countertops when working dough or feeding my starter here and there.) I’m a believer in the goodness of the whole grain, but dogmatism is high maintenance.

I say this isn’t *healthy*, and mostly it’s not, but it’s also not so very unhealthy. 

What I mean is, it’s at least made of wholesome ingredients. 

Frostings from the grocery store or supermarket bakery are not- well I’ll just leave it at that- they just are not. 

Those remarkably stable, piped frostings of unnatural color are made of ultra-processed and convoluted hydrogenated oils, questionable artificial dyes, not to mention copious amounts of processed sugar. 

All that to say, I want to feel good about the foods I make, eat and serve, and this one might not be top of the list, but it’s still real food. 

How to Ermine

In a medium sized boiler on medium heat, pour in the milk and flour and just stay close by, whisking (by hand is fine) occasionally. Nothing serious will happen until the milk has become very warm, at which point you’ll have to stay near the pot, stirring almost continuously. Don’t let it come to a boil, just steaming hot is ideal. 

The goal is twofold:

1. Don’t scorch it. This is a real threat as the bottom of the pot begins to thicken first, making a putty that needs to be constantly interrupted. 

2. Whisk the mixture into a smooth pudding texture. Once the mixture has thickened sufficiently, which will happen fairly quickly when it’s hot enough, remove the pot from the heat and mix in the sugar as well. 

The next step is not absolutely necessary, but if you have an ideal sieve or strainer on hand, go ahead and do it.

I like to set a medium sized sieve inside of a bowl and pour the hot mixture from the pot into it. It takes just a minute to let it drain through the sieve and it strains out all the little irregular clumps that would have dotted the final frosting. 

Cover the bowl of pudding mixture with a plastic wrap, making direct contact with the surface to prevent a “skin” from forming, and let it chill. It needs to be room temperature if not a little cooler before it can be added into the whipped butter. 

Speaking of whipped butter, go ahead and whip some butter! 

The final step is to incorporate the two bowls and add some vanilla extract (and maybe salt as well if you’re using unsalted butter) into one glorious mousse of a frosting. 

Isn’t it lovely !?