Have you ever seen a beautifully decorated white cake, but when you ate it your first reaction was yuck as it left a greasy aftertaste in your mouth?

The reason for this problem lies in what makes icing white. Well a key ingredient in icing is butter - which creates a problem for bakers. Most butter in the US is yellow, which gives icing an off white or ivory color. To get pure white icing, bakers must use expensive white butter (imported from Europe). Unfortunately some bakers use a less-expensive short cut to get white “butter cream” icing—they add white shorting like Crisco, Yuck! That’s why some cake icing has a greasy aftertaste.

If you want white icing, you might ask your baker how they make their icing white. For example some bakers offer a meringue icing (made from egg whites), while others do fondant, a paste of sugar, water and corn syrup that’s rolled over the cake. Yet another trick: add one drop of blue food coloring to the batch of icing, which turns off white icing into a pure white hue. Each of these methods achieve a white look without the Crisco