I am attempting to make a browned butter vanilla cupcake.  The recipe I have indicates that I should cream the “chilled” browned butter and the sugar together.  My browned butter, which I made yesterday and put into the fridge to chill, is solid.  As solid as any regular stick of butter would be straight out of the fridge.  I am wondering what your thoughts are on this….is there a valid reason why I should not let the browned butter soften prior to creaming?  It just seems fishy to me and before I waste 24 oz of beautiful, delicious browned butter I thought I would see what the experts on here thought.

Thanks in advance.

Hello, Gia!  I’ll bet they only mean to chill it long enough to solidify, so it’s not liquid anymore.  It will be hard to beat it if it is at 40F or so, refrigerator temp.  I haven’t done it, but it seems like you could bring it to 65F to beat it.  It sill has plenty of saturated fat to make it solid at room temp. 

Please check back and let us know how they turn out!  I love brown butter- which recipie are you using?

I’m with Julie—I think it would work best to let the browned butter get up to “cool room temperature.” If your cake recipe calls for creaming butter & sugar together, you’re going to need the butter to be soft enough to whip up nicely. Getting plenty of air into the mixture is very important for the best cake texture.

Hi Gia,

I’m in NO WAY an authority, but I’m sure Julie and Barbara are right. I believe any recipe that is calling for solidified brown butter to be creamed is trying to take advantage of the flavor that only brown butter can give while using the creaming method to create the light texture that the technique provides. So, you needed to melt that butter to get that brown butter flavor, then solidified and then softened a bit just like you would if you were creaming plain butter that was called for in a regular cake recipe. I hope you get my meaning.

I LOVE the taste of brown butter. Let us know how it turns out because I’m always on the search for recipes that include that heavenly ingredient.

I agree with the others. Bring it to room temp. before creaming it. You kind of have to or else it would be too hard and cold to cream. Good luck. Let us know how it turns out.

Thanks for the help everyone.  The cupcakes didn’t turn out but I’m determined to fix my issues.  I used a recipe I found from a blogger I follow…fields of cake.  It’s an adaptation from the sweet life by Kate Zuckerman.  I don’t own the cookbook but I am going to grab it from the library because the browned butter was SO good and I really want the recipe to work.  The cake batter smelled and tasted delicious, as did the finished cupcake, but the texture was too crumbly (although very moist) and the centers sunk (a lot like what happens with Golden Butter Cream Cake when I tried to make cupcakes!)  It’s possible I under mixed the batter, as I haven’t used a creaming type recipe in quite some time.  I may try some other recipes also, substituting the brown butter for regular butter, because the smell alone of the brown butter was amazing.  I’ll report back if I ever get it to work!

Thanks again,
Gia

GIA:
  Good morning. It seems to me you have received XLNT advice pertaining to creaming fat in your mixer.  65 Degrees is optimum.
Then put paddle to the fat. I start cutting the butter or cream cheese at 62 degrees…by the time my warm hands are finished cutting up the fat the proper temp. has been reached.
  Good luck in your baking & enjoy the rest of the day my friend.

  ~FRESHKID.