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This royal icing recipe is my absolute favorite for decorating sugar cookies. When I first started my sugar cookie journey, I had no idea what royal icing was. I just knew I wanted to be able to make fancy custom cookies for my son’s birthday each year. After months and months of trying different recipes, I have finally perfected my royal icing recipe.
Sugar cookies have a bad reputation for looking pretty but not tasting good. I, myself, have bitten into a sugar cookie that had icing so hard, I thought I might break a tooth! But I can promise you my recipe will harden but is still soft to bite into. And even more important, it tastes amazing!
INGREDIENTS:
- 4 TBS Meringue Powder (I use Genie’s Dream)
- 1/2 cup + 1 TBS of lukewarm water
- 1 Generous TBS Light Corn Syrup (I use Karo)
- 1 TBS LorAnn Butter Vanilla Emulsion
- 2 LB Bag of Powdered Sugar (I use C&H)
- 1-2 TSP White Gel Food Coloring
DIRECTIONS:
Spoon 4 level scoops of meringue powder into your mixer bowl. Add 1/2 cup and 1TBS lukewarm water and whisk by hand until frothy. Add 1 generous TBS corn syrup and 1 TBS LorAnn flavoring and mix again by hand with your whisk. Then add your 2 LB bag of powdered sugar and mix with mixer on lowest setting until ingredients are combined. It will be very thick. Turn your mixer up to a medium speed (I use speed 4 on my KitchenAid) and mix for 2 minutes. After 2 minutes, turn the mixer off and scrape down sides with a silicone spatula. This is when I add the 1-2 TSP of white gel food coloring. This supposedly helps prevent color bleed and makes your icing a nice bright white. Then I turn the mixer back on again for another 1.5 minutes on level 4.
You do NOT want to overmix royal icing. I repeat…YOU DO NOT WANT TO OVERMIX ROYAL ICING. Overmixing will create a dry porous crumbly icing and it might not fully dry. I’ve seen some recipes call for much longer mixing times, but I stick with the 3.5-4 minutes mix time maximum and it turns out perfect every time.
CONSISTENCY TIPS:
When I first started making royal icing, I read over and over that it will be finished mixing when it forms stiff peaks. But I found myself spending WAY too much time thinning out my icing by adding tiny amounts of water until I got to my desired “outline” and “flood” consistencies. Which can take FOREVER when you have to make multiple colors. So now I like to make mine more of a “glob & ribbon” consistency from the get-go, which is a medium consistency. I find it easier to just add more powdered sugar to a small batch at a time if I need a thicker consistency for details. The great thing about royal icing is you can almost always just add more water or more powdered sugar to get a thinner/thicker consistency. “Practice makes perfect”!
This is an example of my flood consistency. You want it thin enough to “melt into itself” as shown above, for a smooth finish. I use Prestee piping bags and simply cut the tip off to my desired size for decorating. Smaller for outlining and larger for flooding.
PRO TIP: give the cookie a shake (while still laying flat on a table/cookie sheet) to really smooth the surface. You can also use a toothpick or scribe to pop any bubbles.
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