I thought I followed the directions. But, I must have not done something right, since my finished product looks nothing like the picture. Rather than trash the entire bowl of icing, I added some confectioners sugar to firm up the icing (I used 3 c butter, so the additional sugar didn't make it any sweeter than your average icing).

Wonderful! I just made a test batch since I'm auditioning frostings for a wedding cake, and it came out fabulous! I actually halved the butter fearing it would be too "buttery" as some of the prior reviews mentioned, but I think I might add more (if not all) next time. Besides, when reducing the butter, you'd have to cut the sugar a bit in order to account for the lesser volume. I put a little aside, and added a little espresso powder and a little cocoa powder for a mild mocha, and that was great too. I used it for piping, and it piped well. This recipe is the one I'm using for the wedding cake; chocolate cake, mocha buttercream filling, vanilla buttercream frosting and decoration. This is a Swiss meringue buttercream, and I think it's much easier than the Italian buttercream that I tried making before. Oh, I also heated the egg whites to 160*F to eliminate salmonella concerns; recipe turned out fine for me. I used an electric hand mixer, not a stand one also; took a little longer, but the results were good.

Make sure your bowl and beaters are free of grease. Also room temperature eggs are best. If you have a gas stove you can put the eggs in the oven the day before because the piolet light will make them the perfect temp. Also you can use stabilzing agents. Wonderful recipe. Definately will use this over and over again.

I made this twice, thinking I did something wrong the first time. The flavor was wonderful however the frosting came out VERY thin and runny each time, regardless of how long I beat the egg whites. The butter completely thinned it out and it was not stiff at all. I even refridgerated it for several hours thinking that might stiffen it up with no luck. I could be doing something wrong but I followed the recipie exactly and both times I ended up with very thin frosting, more like an icing actually.

This was so good! Might be the best buttercream I have ever tasted. I only gave it four stars because I only put in two cups of butter, and I don't know how it would be with three. I stopped at two cups of butter because that was when it came together and was really fluffy. I was worried about too much butter because other recipes I have tried similar to this have ended up just tasting like butter. Two cups worked perfect for our taste. I filled and frosted 26 cupcakes, with plenty left over.

Recipe was fairly easy to make, produced a good quantity of frosting,and it covered well; however, I stopped adding butter after 2.5 cups and it still came out tasting more buttery than sweet.

I can't believe how good this is! While my egg white/sugar mixture never seemed to increase in volume to any degree (perhaps because I used raw sugar?), it still came out wonderful. It is not too sweet and is very smooth. Because of the egg whites, however it might be advisable to refrigerate this after icing the cake. I used this for my son's dragon cake for his 11th birthday.