I’ve been asked to share my buttercream recipe with quite a few people, and it is a recipe that I got from my cake decorating supply store in town called Joy’s Kitchen Magic in Dearborn. This is the same buttercream and I’ve used in all of my Wilton cake decorating classes despite what the textbook says 
This buttercream is truly white in colour.
The buttercream recipe below yields 6+ cups, (which is A LOT) I use to ice a whole 2 layer 8″ cake plus extras for class …You may want to just make half of this and store extras. They last quite awhile during the winter in Michigan. In hot climate you might need to store in the fridge. Whip them up with the electric mixer prior to using again.
Ingredients
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1 pound shortening (in M’sia popular good brand is Krimwell, in US it’s Sweetex) – room temperature
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1 pound white margarine – room temperature
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2 lbs. icing/confectioner’s sugar, sifted
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1 cup evaporated milk (water is OK too, but evaporated milk is yummier)
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1 tsp of flavouring (butter + vanilla, or butter + almond/orange, etc)
Method
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Cream shortening and margarine together on low to medium speed until fluffy and nicely incorporated.
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Add flavouring, beat again.
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Add sifted sugar and evaporated milk alternately until you get the consistency that you want.
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Note: Use less milk if you want stiffer consistency.
Chocolate Flavoured Buttercream
For chocolate flavoured buttercream, simply add melted unsweetened chocolate to the regular buttercream until you achieve the chocolat-ey taste that you want. I like a lot of chocolate 
To get the colour that you want, you can add chocolate brown icing colour to the mixture due to melted chocolate to white icing ratio being relatively small.
I was making a cake for tomorrow’s Wilton cake decorating class and I was trying to get creative with a box of yellow cake mix. I’ve used different fillings before, so I thought I’d try to make marble cake instead. I was looking for an easy way to make it without using too much extra ingredients, and one of the recipe I found simply required me to mix melted unsweetened chocolate with 1/3 of the yellow cake batter. Simple enough, I thought, except that when I poured it into the 8X8 pan, the batter overflowed! So I quickly lined a muffin pan with paper cups and poured the remaining batter in to make cupcakes.
