Swiss Meringue Buttercream

Up until now I had been using the decorators buttercream recipe that I learned in my cake class. It's a very basic recipe that consists of mainly shortening and icing sugar. It's easy to decorate with but super sweet (think grocery store birthday cake icing) and a bit heavy. I actually like it, but many don't so i wanted to try something new, lighter.

I found this recipe on http://cakecentral.com/. Cake Central is an awesome community of cake decorators and bakers with tons of advice, tips, and recipes. This site has been an invaluable resource to me since I started decorating!

The recipe itself was relatively easy, even considering the heating of the egg whites to a specific temperature and the icing turned out yummy. Incredibly light and airy and reminded me of the icing my mom used to make on our birthday cakes when I was a kid. It did taste very buttery though and I think next time I'll add a bit more flavoring to tone down the butter flavor.

I ended up using this to decorate cupcakes so not sure how it would hold up if you were to ice a cake with it. I think it would be great as a filling though! The cupcakes were iced using the 1M tip.