Cut The Sweetness Of Store-Bought Frosting With An Easy Fix

Store-bought, canned frosting is convenient, but it's seldom the best choice for finishing off cookies, cakes, and other baked goods. Compared with silky homemade buttercream, it's dense and pretty much just tastes of sugar. Fortunately, there are simple ways to enhance and upgrade pre-made canned frosting, like adding whipped cream to make your frosting airier. Speaking exclusively to Chowhound, baker Anna Gordon, founder and co-owner of Brooklyn's The Good Batch bakery, shared her inspired strategy for dealing with saccharine frosting: Offset all that sugar. "To cut sweetness," she says of canned frostings, "I'd suggest balancing with anything in the sour/bitter/tart family, such as citrus juice or zest, buttermilk, or cocktail bitters."

While there are a lot of flavorful ingredients you can use to enhance store-bought frosting, like strong coffee or pumpkin pie spice, the suggestions Gordon gives are designed to reign in the kind of excessively sweet frosting that might send Prue Leith of "The Great British Bake Off" fame running from the tent. To that end, she highlights another complementary taste, salinity, noting, "Also, a dash of salt will also combat the sweet." By adding these contrasting flavors, your taste buds perceive the frosting's sweetness differently as the other tastes cut through.

It's worth remembering that the suggestions Anna Gordon makes serve a specific function when using pre-made cake frosting. "All of these flavors help balance flavor so it's not just sweetness hitting your palate," she notes. (Meanwhile, if piping is your goal, all you need to do is whip canned frosting with a whisk or fork until it's creamy enough to pipe.)

Perhaps flavor complexity is just as important to you as reduced sweetness. Cocktail bitters such as Fee Brother's Cardamom or Black Walnut Bitters from Strongwater will work particularly well. Always use ingredients that complement the frosting. In the case of vanilla or chocolate, consider coffee, bourbon, or freeze-dried citrus powders, like True Lemon and True Lime.

It doesn't take much to cut the sweetness of store-bought frosting. Just as Gordon suggested only a dash of salt, so too other options can be effective in small amounts. The best way to figure out how much of any ingredient you'll need is to start small and add a little more at a time, mixing it in until the frosting tastes right to you.