Dawn's Buttercream

I am a teacher at a High School and they asked if I would help make cupcakes for today's Prom, how exciting is that?! I absolutely love my job and I love the people I get to work with! Dawn, Mary, and I (the technology team) spent the entire day making cupcakes! We used Dawn's Buttercream recipe which uses almond extract, I've never had almond extract before but it was SO good in the frosting, not nutty at all, it was more like a citrus flavor! Click on the pictures to see a full screen version, in full screen you can really see the cupcakes sparkle!

Here's Dawn (she's a hoot) mixing her famous frosting. I ate so much of this icing I embarrassed myself!
Here I am piping the icing onto the cupcakes using my Wilton 1M tip, my favorite decorating tip to use on cupcakes!
Here's Mary (the nicest person I know) sprinkling edible glitter on each cupcake, the glitter really made these cupcakes look amazing! Mary called it her magic fairy dust and she had to refrain from making a "twinkle twinkle" noise every time she sprinkled it, hehe
Ingredients
1 cup shortening (Dawn uses Crisco)
1 pound powdered sugar
1 teaspoon almond extract
2 tablespoons water or milk (Dawn used water so the frosting didn't have to be refrigerated)
2 tablespoons meringue powder

Directions
Cream shortening, water and flavoring. Add powdered sugar and meringue powder. Mix until blended. Add additional water until you reach the desired consistency. Stiff icing is good for some flowers, Dawn likes the soft consistency for icing cakes and a medium consistency was great for the cupcakes we made. If you want really white icing be sure to use a clear extract. If you use regular vanilla extract instead of the almond it makes the icing off white.

We had probably 8 boxes of cupcakes total. These 2 boxes showed each of our flavors though, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry cupcakes with purple, white, and blue frosting.