First Imbc Try And I Need To Know If This Is What It Looks
Decorating By wgoat5 Updated 23 Sep 2007 , 3:31pm by FromScratch
Do you use pasteurized egg whites, or does adding the hot syrup cook the white enough to make them safe? I'd love to try my luck with this recipe. Bull
You should use pasteurized egg whites if you're selling your cakes. The sugar syrup only gets the whites up to about 135' which is not hot enough to kill salmonella. I heard this once so tested out the temperature myself and yep, only got to 135' or so. It has to get up to 140' for 10 minutes to kill salmonella.
for myself? I wouldn't worry as much. I eat raw cookie dough and cake batter all the time 
Maybe this was answered in the other forum someone gave the link to, but is IMBC stiff enough to decorate with (borders, roses, etc.)? It sounds like the consistency would make it hard to work with for things like that, but maybe that's just me.
I decorate with it all the time. It's about the same as medium consistency wilton bc, as long as you don't let it get too warm. when I have a problem is when I'm doing something where I use alot of the same color, such as basketweave and it gets warmed up from my hand. It kinda changes color when it warms though so you can tell when it's going to get droopy. As for the finished product, you need to keep it refrigerated anyway because it does have the egg whites in it so that will firm anything up.
I always use pasteurized egg whites, and I even made it three ways once and did a taste test: raw egg whites, pasteurized liquid ew, and powdered egg whites. There was a nominal and I do mean NOMINAL difference in taste amongst the three, preferable in the order given, meaning fresh was the best (but seriously, it was almost impossible to tell between the three and variations in creating the batch could have been the cause anyway). However I won't use unpasteurized, even though salmonella risk is like 1 in 20,000. Even though, yes, I LOVE to eat cookie dough 
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Powdered egg whites always whip up just like regular ones and are "proven" to work for meringues. They smell funny when you first whip them up (I almost threw them away) but once you make the icing, everything is fine, no funny smell, taste, etc. Plus they keep forever in your pantry.
I prefer to use liquid pasteurized ew but they aren't always guaranteed to whip up - it even says so on the carton. I used to use Trader Joe's easy scrambles (or some such thing) because it was a 4-pak so I didn't have to waste the rest of a big carton. When they temporarily discontinued it I used their regular liquid egg whites and that whipped into a meringue without problem. But once I was in the supermarket and grabbed a carton of "All Whites" brand and can I tell you, these did NOT whip up into meringue. The best I got was "almost" soft peaks. So I wouldn't recommend that brand.
Just FYI!!
This is why I make SMBC now.. since you cook the egg whites and sugar together you can make sure they get hot enough. I use my candy thermometer and get them to at least 160 degrees before I put the mixture on my mixer.
Oh.. and if you want to see a cake that has IMBC on it I have this one.. http://www.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=395393
And one with SMBC here http://www.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=897153
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