I made buttercream icing for the first time with real butter and it seems to separate when I add colour to it. I am using the Wilton colours as that is all I have at hand. It really doesn't look very nice. I had a really hard time getting it smooth on the cake too, I finally just gave up and left it as it was. Any ideas?
Did you use the butter flavor shortening?
We had this happen when we were making my son's birthday cake, and then only thing we could think that caused the separating was the butter crisco. That's the only think we didn't differently in the recipe. My recipe is 1/2 crisco, 1/2 butter.
Tina
Well our a/c did break down yesterday 
so that could be it. I had the butter in the fridge and let it get to room temp before I used it but maybe it was too soft. I have to try it again today so I won't leave the butter out as long and maybe that will help.
Thanks so much!
I would say you overbeat the icing. When you put it on top of the cake and tried to smooth it, did you get little pockets (for lack of a better term)?
If not that, it could be the heat, whether you used butter or crisco.
I had the same thing happen to some of my icing. It was an all-crisco recipe, and my AC was definitely NOT broken. I needed to color it red, and it colored red, but it looked like red and white swirls. I thought I had not beat it long enough, since the recipe said to beat it for 20 minutes. I think I beat it for 20 minutes, but I'm impatient by nature, so I might have shaved a couple of minutes... Maybe we didnt beat our icing enough??
Jasara-
It sounds as if the previous poster's recipe is different from yours. If you're using the Wilton recipe, you shouldn't be beating it for 20 minutes. Once the ingredients incorporate, you should only beat it until it becomes smooth and creamy. If you overbeat it, the icing will start to break down (as I mentioned above).
If you're going to color the whole batch of icing, you can mix in color as your doing you initial beating...if that makes sense.
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