The Best Way To Thicken Your Store-Bought Frosting With One Extra Ingredient

Sometimes, when it comes to baking at home, the real expert tips boil down to making convenient, consistent store-bought products work for you by doctoring them up. We've covered how a can of sweetened condensed milk mixed with boxed cake can make it taste homemade, and we've sampled just about every other ingredient to hack powdered mix, from pudding mix to canned soda. It turns out there's a slew of ways to upgrade canned frosting as well, depending on what aspect of the icing you are trying to hack. You can also handily turn canned frosting into buttercream by adding butter, for instance. And, while it will taste better, if you are trying to pipe perfect, firm rosettes or curlicues, you will want a stiffer frosting — and you can accomplish this easily by whipping ¾ of a cup of powdered sugar into a can of frosting.

First, sift the sugar to work out any lumps. If they're proving persistent, you can push the bowl of a spoon against your sifter to break them up. Next, use a hand mixer and whip the frosting on low for two minutes to incorporate the sugar; you're starting low to avoid a powdery mess. Once the sugar is worked mostly into the frosting, go ahead and turn the mixer up to high. Look for the frosting to form peaks, as this will be how you know that it is thick enough to hold decorations when you pipe it.

Home bakers have long struggled with using canned frosting when it comes to decorating cakes. On one hand, homemade frosting can be temperamental. By contrast, the store-bought stuff comes in a variety of ready-made, grab-and-go flavors, but it can be quite soft. It's not impossible to use your can o' Betty Crocker to make a beautiful cake; you'll just need to hack it a bit. Using powdered sugar is the ideal solution, but there are a few alternatives.

We've seen marshmallow fluff mixed into frosting as a thickener. This adds a pleasant vanilla mellowness to the taste of your frosting, and it definitely makes a stiffer icing. On the other hand, if you're trying to avoid an overly sugary frosting, this won't necessarily help. Also, marshmallow is not as neutral a flavor as powdered sugar, so you have to make sure it will work with the flavor palate you are aiming for.

According to social media, you might be able to alter the texture of canned frosting by simply whipping it with your blender and then chilling it. This will incorporate air bubbles and, therefore, structure into your icing and make it easier to work with ... at least in the short term. However, we worry that if you leave the cake sitting out for any period of time, the decorations will droop as they come back to room temperature. For our money, using just a bit of powdered sugar to thicken frosting is where it's at.