How To Make Coffee Frosting To Amp Up Your Favorite Desserts

If you're a coffee aficionado who enjoys so much more than just your morning cuppa joe, then amplifying your favorite dessert with a coffee-flavored icing is a no-brainer. Rather than brewing up a pot of your favorite roasted blend for your next batch of frosting, you'll get a more intense, rich coffee flavor by using instant coffee instead.

Baking with instant coffee is far from unheard of. The "Barefoot Contessa" Ina Garten uses both instant and brewed coffee to boost the flavor in her game-changing chocolate cake, and French-trained chef Julia Child often made instant coffee sundaes for a simple dinner party dessert. Instant coffee is essentially a concentrate that dissolves easily in any liquid, allowing for an evenly extracted infusion of coffee flavor into any application, including cakes, cookies, glazes, breads, and even the silkiest buttercream frosting. 

To add it to your recipe, simply dissolve a couple of tablespoons of instant coffee into an equal amount of hot water and let the mixture cool completely. Beat unsalted butter in a bowl with an electric mixer, and add powdered sugar, a bit of vanilla extract, and a pinch of salt, and mix well. Then stir in your coffee. Feel free to add a teaspoon more if you really want to kick up that rich, java flavor. Using instant coffee instead of fresh-brewed eliminates the extra liquid that would loosen the consistency of the frosting, while packing a more intense coffee flavor. Plus, it reduces the chance of stray coffee grounds marring the resulting texture.

Around longer than you might expect, instant coffee first appeared in England during the late 18th century. More than a century later, a New Zealander named David Strang developed a soluble instant coffee, and then a Japanese chemist living in Chicago, Satori Kato, created the first coffee powder with a shelf life in 1903. Instant coffee is made from real coffee beans that have been ground, brewed, and then concentrated by drying or removing the water through spray or freeze-drying processes. What's left is a fine, porous powdered product that's easily dissolved in water — perfect for the milk and softened butter used in buttercream frosting.

Although a stigma still lingers, the appeal of instant coffee is on the rise due to influences such as the whipped Dalgona coffee trend, its affordability compared to regular coffee (especially as coffee keeps getting costlier), and because many new manufacturers are simply making better brands of instant coffee. While you can always fall back on classic, tried-and-true instant coffee brands like Nescafé, feel free to try different flavors and roasts, or even instant espresso, to boost the java flavor in your next coffee buttercream frosting.