Hi! I am Randy. Today we're making a Chocolate Cake. At this point, I am going to show you how to make a Swiss Meringue Buttercream Icing. The first thing I want to show you is how to separate an egg.

Take your egg in one hand, crack it firmly on a different surface than you use the bowl. Put it into your other hand, and we're going to make sure that the yolk and the white are separate. So always best to do this in two separate bowls, that way the yolk won't break into the white. Make sure of course your hands and the area are all very clean and sanitized. We are going to use 250 milliliters of egg whites.

Next thing we're going to do is take the egg whites and mix it into our sugar. So I am just mixing this up, it does not need to be whipped, just stirred, so there is no sugar on the bottom of the bowl. This is a swiss meringue butter cream icing. We are only using butter as the fat, egg white, sugar and butter. It's very creamy and light, meringue-based icing.

There we go, now the sugar is all up from the bowl and we can take it over to the stove, and put it over a double boiler. You can use any bowl and any pot as double boiler. You do not need to buy anything special for your double boiler.

In the next step, we're going to take our bowl with our sugar and egg whites, bring it over to the stove. The flame is set at a medium flame. We will mix ingredients in here, about every five or ten minutes. It does not need to be constantly stirred, just want to make sure that the sugar is up from the bottom of the bowl.

When this is ready, the sugar will be dissolved. We actually will be putting our fingers into the bowl and feeling the sugar between our fingers. When you don't feel that granule, you know it's ready. This is now perfectly smooth. So I am putting it into the mixer, and now we are going to turn it on to the high setting for 30 minutes.

Now we're going to turn the mixer down to the lowest speed, take our butter that has been sitting in the refrigerator, add it to the meringu-base all at one time. We are going to turn the mixer on to the high speed for five minutes and turn it down, turn it off. Scrape the sides down with our spatula and let it set at Speed 1 for about 10 or 15 minutes until it's blended. It's blended when there is no more butter chunks at the bottom of the bowl.

Coming up in our next segment, we're going to show you how to assemble the cake and then decorate it.