Marbled Royal Icing Tutorial

Looking for any easy(ish) way to decorate your own cookies and spread holiday cheer? Without fail, one of my popular designs is my snowflake swirl cookie. The marbled effect looks complicated, but it’s quite easy to pull off. If you’re more of a visual person, click here to head to my Instagram and watch a Reel I made about this process.

What You’ll Need:

• Cookies!

• White royal icing with a 12-15 second consistency (See Blog Post Here)

• 2-3 gel food colors*

• A few toothpicks

• A cooling rack

Step 1: Pour your royal icing into a flat dish or bowl. You want to create a nice, thick layer of icing to be able to fully cover the surface of your cookie when you place it in the icing.

Step 2: Put a few drops of food coloring of both (or all three) colors you wish to use. For my cookies, I use Ann Clark’s Blue Sky and Royal Blue. Click here for my Amazon link! Only 5-8 drops will do the trick.

Step 3: Drag your toothpick through the icing and swirl it around - creating a marbled effect. Important: do not overly mix the colors into the icing! You want to have plenty of white icing left visible.

Step 4: Holding onto your cookie the entire time (i.e. don’t drop it in the icing), gently and carefully dip the top of the cookie into the icing, ensuring you’ve covered the entire surface area. While still facing the bowl, shake your cookie from side to side or in a circle to shake off excess icing. Allow this to drop back into the bowl.

Step 5: Flip your cookie over and and place it on a cooling rack with a paper towel or parchment paper underneath it. If you dunked the cookie too much, you’ll have a lot of excess dripping off the cookie to the paper towel. Ideally, there is minimal excess at this point.

Step 6: With all the shaking, it’s possible that air bubbles will form. Use a clean toothpick to gently pop the air bubbles while the icing is still wet.

Step 7: Repeat steps 4-6 until your icing starts to look like it’s losing the marbled pattern.

Step 8: Let your royal icing dry and harden before eating or adding additional designs. This technique allows the icing to dry a bit faster versus flooding, so really should only be a few hours before the surface hardens. I like to use white icing in a tipless bag to create designs overtop the marbled effect or toss some luster dust (the edible glitter of the cookie world). But the marbled design is impressive as is!


Pro Tips:

• Royal icing starts drying as soon as it hits the air. This technique will dry out the icing faster than keeping it in a piping bag. Be sure to work fast, or leave half of the icing in a bowl covered with a damp paper towel to ensure royal icing you have enough to finish your cookies.

• If you’re letting the kiddos have fun with the process, I may recommend some gloves. The food coloring is likely to get on your fingers if you’re not dunking carefully. I know my nieces and nephews well enough to know they would absolutely stick their entire hand in the bowl. :)

• Colors will eventually mix together. To ensure you keep a marbling effect, add a few more drops of food coloring and re-swirl with your toothpick. Once you can’t see a contrast in your bowl, that’s the time to re-marble.

• Once your cookies are all drying, fully mix together any icing left over, add a tiny bit of water if the icing got thicker and dried out, and use the new blue icing for extra designs on your snowflakes!

• To elevate your design, you can mix a bit of silver or gold luster dust with clear vanilla extract and use a small paintbrush to trace along some of the swirls. This creates a really beautiful, shiny effect perfect for the holidays.
  

Happy decorating! Questions? Send me an email or Instagram DM to chat.
- Xoxo, Julie @ Normaneek Bakery