Buttercream Dreams (or rather, nightmares)

Tonight I made my first buttercream ever. The real kind, made with real butter. I'm kind of a big deal, in the kitchen, so when I offered to make it for my boss' birthday cake I was thinking "No sweat!". But oh, the sweat! Mostly the sweating was done when I had added half the butter to the egg/sugar water mix and it was looking, shall we say, less than firm, and more on the curdled side. With one hand on the mixer (plop a couple butter cubes), willing it to fluff as hard as I could, I texted my cohort the cake maker (plop a couple of butter cubes) to warn her of potential disaster. As the butter continued to look like it had melted and separated from the rest of the mix (plop a couple of butter cubes), I scrambled to look for another recipe online and racked my brain for ways to fix the mess in my mixing bowl. My savior, I believe, came in the form of frozen fruit. I set the bowl on top of a bag of blueberries and a bag of mixed berries to appropriately chill, and therefore, solidify, the butter part (i.e. the namesake of) the buttercream. Ta-da! Either it just takes that long for to solidify and is supposed to look like death halfway through, or my smoothie obsession really did come to the rescue.

But that's not really my point. My point is: nightmares. Throughout the buttercreaming process, I found myself tasting the egg (raw, three of them), sugar, and butter mixture. Delicious! But my poor little tummy. Ow.