Sugar-Free Maple Bacon Buttercream Frosting

The bacon-maple craze has pretty much taken over the world. But this crazy-good recipe really takes the much-loved bacon-maple combo to the next level! Combining salty, crunchy bacon with buttery, sweet frosting, you’re guaranteed to fall in love with it–and you’re going to want to slather it on just about everything.

Tips for preparing the Sugar-Free Maple Bacon Buttercream Frosting

As this is my blog for recipes with 5 ingredients or less, it should come as no surprise that you need just 5 ingredients to whip up this wonderful frosting. It’s very easy to make, too! Sure, you have to fry the bacon first until crispy and then crumble it, but that’s as difficult as it gets. After that, it’s just a matter of beating the stuff with an electric mixer.

Be sure to use softened (aka room temperature) butter, though. I took my butter out of the fridge a little too late, so I placed it in the oven for a couple of minutes while I was heating it up to bake the muffins you see in these photos. (If you are interested in that muffin recipe, I used this one without blueberry jam.)

Don’t use melted butter, though, as it definitely won’t work in this recipe. Butter at room temperature produces the fluffiest result, which is what you want for this frosting.

In the recipe, I use 1 cup (240 ml) powdered erythritol. It makes pretty sweet frosting, so you might want to start with a smaller amount and add more if needed.

When you add the crumbled bacon, add only half and leave the rest for sprinkling on top of the frosted muffins, cupcakes or cake — or whatever you’re planning to frost. That way you’ll get more flavor and more crunch.

When you add the half of the crumbled bacon to the frosting, make sure to beat it properly so that the bacon fractures into even smaller pieces. The frosting will look better and it’ll be easier to spread or pipe.

If you pipe the frosting, use a tip with wide mouth. The frosting will have tiny pieces of bacon in it, and even though they’ll be very small they might not fit through a narrow-mouthed piping tip. I use a large star tip, quite like this one here.

Other than that, no tricks needed in preparing this mind-blowing frosting. So, let’s take a look at how to do it.

First, fry enough bacon…

…until crispy.

Crumble it.

Next, take unsalted softened butter…

…and powdered erythritol.

Beat them…

…here we go…

…until very fluffy. This might take some 5-10 minutes.

Add the maple flavoring…

…and the vanilla stevia.

Beat again until fluffy, about 5 minutes.

Finally, add half of the crumbled bacon.

Beat until well combined.

Ready!

Pipe or spread on your low-carb muffins, cupcakes or cakes.

Sprinkle the rest of the crumbled bacon on top.

Enjoy!

 

My Sugar-Free Maple Bacon Buttercream Frosting experiments

Lately I’ve been posting recipes that I developed a couple of years ago (like last week’s Chocolate Cheesecake Fat Bomb Everything recipe). This Sugar-Free Maple Bacon Buttercream Frosting recipe is also from August 2016. I was very into meal plans at the time, and was planning to develop a Bacon Lover’s Meal plan, in which every day would include bacon in one form or another. Well, it didn’t turn out to be the most brilliant idea, since no one (except one person!) seemed to be interested in the meal plan. So I dumped the idea for the bacon-y meal plan – but not the recipes I would have used for it.

I had developed several delicious recipes for the meal plan, like Creamy & Cheesy Bacon Dip, Baconnaise, and Bacon Lover’s Omelet Roll. There were also sweet recipes, like The Ultimate Bacon Maple Ice Cream and this Maple Bacon Buttercream Frosting. I never published those recipes anywhere, so I decided that now was the time to do it (well, at least for the recipes with 5 ingredients or less!)

I remember I arrived at this “crazy” idea of combining bacon with sweet frosting when I tried to think of sweet recipes in which I could embed some bacon. It wasn’t that big of a leap. Buttercream frosting is one of my favorite frostings. It’s both super-easy to make and extremely rich and delicious. How would bacon work in a buttercream frosting, I wondered?

When thinking of bacon in conjunction with sweet flavors, maple came to mind immediately. I just love the combination, so I decided to add some maple flavoring to the bacon-y buttercream frosting.

I was planning to sweeten the frosting with powdered erythritol like I always do, and maybe add some stevia as well to reduce the cooling aftertaste of erythritol. (Just like heads, two sweeteners are better than one!) And to enhance the flavors even more, I wanted to see how vanilla stevia would work.

First, I fried 8 slices of bacon until crispy. I crumbled the bacon and set it aside. Then I took 1 stick (4 oz = 115 g) softened butter. I wanted to make a smaller batch the first time around to see if my idea for a bacon-y frosting would fly. I beat the butter until very fluffy.

Then I took 3/4 cup (180 ml) powdered erythritol and added it to the butter 1/4 cup (60 ml) at a time, beating well after each addition. After this, I added 15 drops vanilla stevia and 1 teaspoon maple flavoring and beat well. I thought I wanted to reserve some bacon for decoration (and extra crunch!), so I took only half of the crumbled bacon and mixed it well with the frosting.

I had baked some muffins to try this frosting with, so I took a piping bag with large star tip and piped a substantial amount of frosting on each muffin. I also sprinkled the rest of the crumbled bacon on top of the frosted muffins. Then I was ready to do a taste-test. Mmmm… how yummy! I was extra-pleased with the crunchy crumbled bacon strewn on top of the muffins. The frosting itself was a tad too sweet to my taste, but otherwise the flavor was outstanding! The maple flavor really perfected the flavor, while the vanilla stevia lent a subtly elegant note.

The photo below is actually of those muffins I made in 2016. After that, I sort of forgot this recipe until I found it on my list of recipes to post on this blog. Since the Bacon Lover’s Meal Plan never took off, I wanted to put the great recipes I’d developed to good use. And this Maple Bacon Buttercream Frosting was one of my favorites.
 

 
A few days ago I took a look at the notes that I had made for my first experiment with this recipe and decided to double the amounts to make enough frosting for a 8-inch (20 cm) cake (though I really prefer this frosting on cupcakes). This time, I used slightly less erythritol because the last version (two years ago) was so sweet.

Success! I ended up with a perfect result. The sweetness and saltiness were well-balanced, and the creaminess of the butter and the crunch supplied by the bacon complemented each other marvelously. And those bits of crumbled bacon on top were the icing on the cake (almost literally)!

Here’s the recipe: I adore it and I bet it’s going to be one of your favorites, too: