Hi Maggie. I live at 7500 feet & am having a lot of trouble with this. I've made cooked meringue before (without the butter) & it took a lot of trial & error to arrive at a temp of about 235 degrees for the sugar, higher than the 229 that a candy-making guide recommended for my altitude. Doing the same thing with 3 different buttercream recipes has not worked. I've been extremely careful with temperature. I add the syrup & get a gorgeous, firm meringue that I whip until it's about 70 degrees. The second I put the first pat of butter in (yes, I checked the temps of both the butter & the meringue), it turned to pancake batter & would not come back (trust me, it did NOT come back after whipping forEVER and going ahead & adding in more butter). I think a higher sugar temp is required in order to support the addition of butter, so actually I'm going to try making the recipe with no adjustments at all. Of note is that I felt awful wasting all that meringue so I used it to make brownies. One of the buttercream recipes I tried used half cooked & half uncooked sugar. Even though half of the sugar had been cooked, I added back the separated yolks & they came out just fine.

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