Homemade Buttercream Frosting

This buttercream frosting works great as a filling for French Macarons. It's a simple versatile recipe that can be adapted easily to incorporate various flavors. In this case, I added vanilla extract to make a very basic vanilla buttercream frosting.

Most simply, you need a 1:2:2 ratio of egg white, sugar,and butter.

In this case, since we had just made the French Macarons, we had about 50g of egg whites left, so we measured out 100g of sugar and butter.

Step 1: Combine the sugar and the egg whites in a bowl over a pot of water.

This is the trickiest part. Start heating the water (to boiling). Meanwhile, stir the mixture with a whisk until it reaches a temperature of 140°F. This happens roughly when the water starts boiling.

It will start to look slightly more clear (see picture above).

Step 2: Remove from heat and transfer to a KitchenAid mixing bowl. Use mixer to whisk (on high setting) until stiff peaks form. Turn down the setting to "3" and continue whisking until the mixture is relatively cool to touch.

Step 3: Change from whisk to paddle and continue on setting "3" while adding chunks of butter, about a tablespoon at a time. Mix to emulsify.

Now you can pipe the buttercream frosting onto macaron cookies. We used a Ziploc bag to pipe the frosting since we did not have pastry bags. It worked just fine!