Hi, I made a cake today and used Swiss Buttercream. I wish I would have found this site earlier because I threw away an entire batch because I thought it was "broken". My question is after I iced the entire cake and began decorating it, I noticed that the cake was "weeping". Also I had some chunks of butter in the finished buttercream I used. It tasted good, and looked ok. It could have had a smoother appearance, but I felt it was fine. What causes the weeping? It seems that I should have whipped the buttercream longer to avoid the chunks, but it looked like it was breaking and I was too nervous to continue. What should I do differently in the future? I appreciate any feedback. Thanks!! From what you describe, I think a couple of things were happening. If you still had chunks of butter, it was probably not soft enough; it also sounds like you didn't beat it long enough for a complete emulsion to occur, and thus the weeping. A buttercream is basically composed of drops of water suspended between fat particles. If you leave either part of the emulsion in a high enough concentration in the matrix, they're going to try and "get back together". That's what you saw with the weeping. Extremes of temperature can also cause an emulsion to break, but your chunks clue leads me to believe it was the former. Susan

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