Sour cherry jam gives this buttercream its flavor. Use cherry jam buttercream frosting on chocolate cakes, lime cupcakes, sugar cookies, or anything that goes well with cherries.

I love cherries. The sour ones just make my mouth water. The sad thing is you can only find fresh cherries for a short time in late summer. I keep my eyes peeled for their arrival and stash some in my freezer for Thanksgiving pies and winter treats.

I missed cherry season so I don’t have any in my freezer right now. That’s probably a good thing because my Cambodian freezer is tiny. Without fresh cherries, the only way to get cherry flavored frosting was to find cherry flavoring (no go here) or add some cherry jam.

I used a high fruit jam for this and there are little flecks of cherry in my frosting. If you want decorator icing, you’ll need to buy jam without fruit bits. If you can’t find that, then warm a couple tablespoons of jam until it melts (microwave it just a little). Then strain it.

This recipe makes enough cherry jam buttercream frosting to top 2 dozen sugar cookies. I used it as filling for these scrumptious chocolate bat cookies.

It’s not enough to frost a cake so double the recipe if you’re going to put it on a cake.

The cherry jam gives this buttercream some flavor but not much color. Without food coloring, this frosting is a light pink (perfect for valentines or Easter). If you want a light pink frosting, there’s no need to add food coloring. I wanted mine a deeper red so I added a few drops of food coloring.

Cherry Jam Buttercream

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Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 tablespoon cherry jam (high fruit works best)
• 1 tablespoon milk
• 2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 1 tablespoon meringue powder
• red food coloring if desired.

Instructions

1. Cream butter and sugar.
2. Add remaining ingredients and beat until smooth.
3. if needed, adjust the consistency of the frosting by adding more powdered sugar or milk.

This buttercream would be fabulous on these

Key Lime Cupcakes

Special Dark Cupcakes

You might also love this cherry-flavored cake from Jenni Fields Pastry Chef

Cheerwine layer cake