5 Simple Tips to Conquer Royal Icing
Intro
Whether you’re planning for a home bakery or just looking to dramatically impress your pals and family with your cookie decorating skills - royal icing can be your best friend. It can also be your archnemesis if you struggle to nail the consistency. Below are five simple tips to help you conquer royal icing and outline, flood, and decorate with confidence.
1. Nail the Consistency
Why It Matters: If your consistency is too thick - it’s difficult to pipe, will pop open your icing bags, and you will genuinely hurt your hand. Not to mention it will dry and be a bit, well, crunchy and sharp. If your icing is too thin, it’s impossible to decorate without spillage, and it may take a very, very long time to dry.
Pro Tip: Start with a stiff icing and thin it down gradually using water (just a bit at a time). Some bakers prefer to use a water spray bottle to be extra careful, but I find that just few drops at a time will do the trick.
Preferred Consistency: I prefer to use one consistency to both outline and flood. I’ve found that the 15-second icing works best here. After you prep your icing, if you drizzle it back into its bowl, it should settle and smooth out around the 12-15 second mark.
When to Use a Thicker Consistency:
Flowers/florals. More 3D designs here will call for a slightly thicker royal icing so that the petals hold their shapes.
Creating textures. Every Christmas I make a Santa cookie with a pretty chunky beard. I get this effect by using a thicker royal icing and a piping tip.
Ruffles. You’ll need more structure for ruffles to hold!
Writing/fine line designs. Thicker royal icing is absolutely needed for finer detail here.
2. Use Gel Food Coloring
Why It Matters: You get more bang for your buck with gel colorings, and you’re not affecting the consistency as much as you would if you had a liquid coloring.
Pro Tip: It’s actually super easy to oversaturate your icings! You want to add in gel slowly and carefully and mix thoroughly before deciding if you need more. The color will continue to deepen if you let the mixture rest for a bit. If you use too much food coloring, your icing may separate and look splotchy when it dries. This tends to happen more often with red coloring (at least in my experience).
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3. Keep a Damp Towel Handy
Why It Matters: To avoid dropping crusty icing into your cookies, keep a towel/paper towel handy to wipe off and unclog your icing bags. As soon as royal icing is exposed to air, it begins to dry. Which is great for the final product, but a bit annoying while you’re in design mode.
Pro Tip: If you don’t mix and bag your icing right after making it, just cover the entire bowl with a damp paper towel. This will help prevent that crusty top layer that will form on your royal icing if left exposed.
4. Use Tipless Bags
Why It Matters: Tipless icing bags allow you to color and bag and toss to the side until you need to use them. They won’t dry out while you continue to color and bag the rest of the colors you need, and you simply need to cut a tiny hole at the tip once you’re ready to design. Unless you need a specific icing tip for a design (like a flower), you can almost always use the tipless bags. And there is less clean up!
Pro Tip: You can actually cut tipless bags at different angles to create different effects you would get with a real tip or by holding at a certain angle. I’ve made petals and ruffles using a tipless bag (just be sure to adjust your consistency as noted in Tip #1).
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5. Add Some Flavor
Why It Matters: Royal icing tends to have a rather plain taste, so I like to play around with different flavoring. Keep in mind that you need to balance out any liquid you add in with powdered sugar; you can easily upset the consistency by trying to change the taste. If you’re adding extract, ensure that it is clear. You want your base to be as white as possible to make it easy to color consistently!
Pro Tip: You can create fun flavor profiles between your cookie recipe and icing recipe. For example, lemon taste tends to bake out for cookies or cakes. One of my favorite recipes is a lemon poppyseed sugar cookie (with lemon zest beat into the sugar and poppyseeds in the cookie dough) and adding lemon juice to the royal icing. Peppermint extract in royal icing is also fun for the holidays with a chocolate sugar cookie or gingerbread recipe!
To Wrap It Up!
Have patience with the process and try out different recipes and techniques in decorating once you are comfortable that you have a good icing consistency. If you run into any issues and want help troubleshooting, send me an email at normaneekbakery@gmail.com or DM me on Instagram. I’m always happy to help a baker in need.
Xoxo, Julie @ Normaneek Bakery
*PS - I am not sponsored by these brands, they are items I genuinely use and recommend. The links are tied to my Amazon account!