Ingredients: Lescure Butter

Hi all. We're kind of cupcake nerds here at C&D, and the guys thought it might be interesting to take an in-depth look at some of the ingredients that go into what we do. We'll be posting them under the tag ingredients so if you fancy reading long and potentially slightly boring ramblings about butter, flour, eggs and the like then you know where to look... Anyway, what better place to start than with our butter?

It's one of the most important ingredients in any cake, or icing, and we only ever use Lescure unsalted butter for all our cupcakes and buttercream. Lescure has Protected Designation of Origin (Appellation d'Origine Protégée, or AOP) certification, which means it can only ever come from dairy herds in the Charente region of France (a little like Champagne from vineyards in Champagne or Parma ham from Parma). This small, tightly-controlled production area helps ensure that quality is kept consistently high.

When choosing butter for baking the key things to look for are fat and water content; Lescure has a very high fat content and a very low water content, which helps make for a richer, moister sponge, as well as amazingly smooth buttercream icing with a beautiful 'mouthfeel'. It's also matured for a relatively short period during the manufacturing process, which together with the soil, climate and feed enjoyed by the cows (they call that stuff terroir in France) produces a fresh, creamy and very slightly nutty-tasting butter.

Like a lot of the ingredients we use Lescure is a bit more expensive than other options (around 20% more than President and other premium butters) but having tried pretty much everything else going it really is the best butter out there. If you've ever made or tried buttercream icing that left a claggy or oily taste in your mouth, or been left scratching your head at a sponge that came out a little dry, our advice would be to get hold of some Lescure and give it a go. And of course if you're not so much into the whole baking thing then you can always bag yourself some of our cupcakes - it's all Lescure all the time, and we'll never use anything else.