BEST ROYAL ICING RECIPE & Perfect Icing Consistency

hi everyone welcome to my updated royal icing tutorial now you can't have good cookies without a good base you have to have the best royal icing you can have to get the best results I've gone through all the issues before and I have the best recipe for you so let's get into [Music] it to make this icing this is what you're going to need 2 lb bag of powdered sugar 3 tbsp of mering powder 2/3 cup of water 1/4 cup of corn syrup 1 tbsp of Butter Bakery Mion I get a lot of questions on what this is and this is a butter flavor and they come in tons and tons of a different flavor this is my favorite go-to for my icing and I also add it to my cookies and I'll also make sure to link it in the description of the video 1 tbsp of vanilla extract or imitation vanilla extract and last but not least one of the most important things 1 teaspoon of white gel color okay so I'm going to start putting my paddle attachment on we don't want to use the Whisk here we want to use the paddle if you're using your KitchenAid if you don't have a KitchenAid don't worry a regular stand mixure is just as fine and we're going to add our powdered sugar and our mering powder together and we're going to give it a little stir just to mix these two together just enough to combine them and make sure they're evenly spread and then we can go on with our wet ingredients so now we're going to go add some water so I have 2/3 cup of water but I'm not going to add Everything at Once the environment changes realy icing so sometimes you need more water a little bit less water it depends on your exact measure measurements cuz a little bit of water goes a long way so I'm going to put about half to 2/3 of it right now and we can always add more after if we need [Music] it it's going to start to look really really ugly before it comes together so trust the process here I'm adding my 1/4 cup of corn syrup and you can see it's kind of coming together right now but it's you know having a tough time cuz it's very very stiff so I'm going to add a little bit more water here to loosen it up and then what I'm going to do is just scrape the sides of the bowl to make sure that everything gets nicely Incorporated notice what it looks like right now it kind of looks like a glaze like it's not really that royal icing fluffy look so if your icing is like this it's undermixed now I'm going to go ahead and add the Butter Bakery Emulsion you can leave the butter flavor out if you don't have it that's totally fine it's just my preference and I feel like it just cuts the sweetness a little bit and adds a little bit more Dimension to the icing it pairs really well with a cookie as well there's tons of other flavor like marshmallow cream cheese lemon um and some mixed flavors as well so you can really turn this icing into anything you'd like and always make sure to keep scraping the bowl right down to the bottom cuz some of that um icing doesn't get mixed in really well so you want to make sure that you get everything in nicely Incorporated I use real vanilla because I do like the flavor of it but you can see it's tinted my icing a little bit of off-white color but we don't have to worry about that too much you can use imitation vanilla extract or clear vanilla extract whichever you'd like and again it's optional if you don't have it on hand it's just for flavor so if you don't have it and you really want to make cookies you can skip it that's totally fine and we're just going to continue to mix and I'm going to add my 1 teaspoon of white color now this is really really important cuz consider this like an ingredient if you don't want color bleed you need to add this to your icing now we're going to go ahead and whip our icing a little bit so it's still a little bit liquid and I may have put a little bit too much water in the beginning and that's okay we can totally fix this but until I'm done whipping my icing I don't want to add any more powdered sugar to stiffen it up because I want to make sure it's at the perfect consistency so now I'm going to just turn it up to about Midway here and you can see it's whipping it up a little bit now this will incorporate just enough air to get it nice and fluffy and thicken it up so now it's looking pretty good you want to make sure you don't go more than like 30 45 seconds cuz if you over mix it at this stage you'll get a crumbly icing but you won't know until your cookies have dried so it'll be too erated and crumbly so here I'm just going to add a couple of spoons of powdered sugar because it's a little bit too soft for my liking I'm trying to get my icing to my outline consistency because I don't want to make it too stiff and too runny I want to get it right away to my outline consistency so I can color it thin it down get my flood and get going if you have another mixer that's not quite as strong as a KitchenAid that's totally fine as well just keep that in mind when you're mixing it you might need a little bit longer maybe another 30 seconds to get it nicely whipped you don't want to go for like 2 3 5 minutes and and kind of crazy whip it it looks beautiful but then when it dries on the cookies it's very crumbly and the icing doesn't hold up very well so now this is looking pretty good you can see all the lines in the icing are staying where they are nothing's melting together if I move it around a little bit it's holding its shape but it's still kind of soft and glossy so that corn syrup gives it a nice shine a softer bite and it gives that icing some flexibility so that's why we add that and it's very important you can leave it out if you don't have it on hand but if you can get your hands on it it really really helps the icing out and you can see all the lines and the textures that I've made nothing's moving so that's a perfect outline consistency and when I give it a good good jiggle you can see it's starting to smooth out so that's what I'm looking for my outline because not only do I use it for my outline I also use it for my detail or very small sections sometimes I will use my outline icing like this icing and I will Squig it with my scrub and get it nice and smooth if it's really small that way it doesn't crater on me and it looks really nice and puffy then I'm going to go ahead and cover it with a damp paper towel make sure you always cover your roll icing or it's going to start to crust over on you and it won't be good so let's go and color our icing so which one should I go for let's do super red red is a really hard color to get so let's do it together so I'm going to put some of my icing in the bowl here do you see how it kind of blobs down this is my outline consistency see look at that nice soft Peak so it's not melting down a soft Peak it's kind of moving slowly that's what we're looking for here so again this is my outline consistency and I use this for my details if I give this a really good firm shake or I wiggle my spatula you'll see that it'll smooth out but otherwise it holds its shape and that's what we want to hold the flood in we're going to use Chef Master super red and we're going to start with a few drops whenever I color my icing I always start with a few drops I can know and how to gauge on how much icing I have in the bowl but I still get it wrong it's always better to do less than more because it's much easier to add color than have to add more icing and make it thinner maybe not end up with so much icing for other colors so a lot of people have difficulties with red icing so the most important thing is to have a good color so some of the colors aren't as strong as others so if you're going to use a gel color I like to use a Mira color or Chef Master there's a few others that are available that also give you a nice strong color but certain ones aren't as strong and so if you're not getting the results try a different brand and see how it works it does take quite a bit of color to get those Reds and blacks and really dark strong colors so just be patient and I find using a spatula is much easier I used to mix with a spoon all the time which is fine as well but getting yourself a nice smaller spatula it's flexible and I find you can mix the icing a lot faster and it kind of prevents less bubbles cuz you're not you're sort of Smashing all all the bubbles versus whipping them in so now you can see I had to add more color it's still quite light pink so as you mix more it starts to look lighter and lighter because we're incorporating all the color make sure you're getting right to the bottom of the bowl and you're getting all that icing underneath and you want to mix it in really well before you start to see the true color it always starts off a little bit dark and you think you're getting there and and then as you mix more and more you get more of that white IC and combine it gets lighter and lighter so it's a little bit of a process but it's definitely doable and always remember that when you have this color here it will not dry this color it always dries a little bit darker so don't go crazy with the color either because sometimes you end up with a really deep deep color you can always do a little test as well so I have a paper towel here I'm just going to take some icing and I'm going to just swipe it on here and let this dry and that'll kind of give you an idea of what it's going to look like when it's dry so if you're not sure if you should add more color or not this is a good little test as well so we're almost there so I've been kind of working with this icing for a little bit the sides because I've got icing up top there it's going to start to Crest over so if you get this you can just cover it with a damp paper towel and that icing will soften up again it'll be okay so we're going to let this sit for a little while if you have you know even 5 10 minutes It'll deepen the color a bit so you can already notice there's a difference you can see my sides have sort of melted back they haven't really um stayed crusted over so that's good so I can scrape them back in and so time also deepens color so if you have the time it's good to do it so if I'm doing a set and I have red and black the hard colors to do I will make those colors first so while I'm doing the other colors while I'm thinning down the other color icing then it has time to sit and develop and it'll become darker and darker and then I like to a couple final drops so I get almost to the color that I want then I'll add a few more drops just to solidify that color make it nice and strong and we're good to [Music] go so now I'm going to get a nice tall cup here I've got my bags here these are bags specifically to pipe without tips so I've got them Linked In the description of the video you can see my icing is nice and bright red now that it's sat for a little while and I've put the bag nicely over the cup and we're going to fill it up with our icing this is the easiest way to fill these bags otherwise it's really hard to hold the bag and it just becomes this huge mess so I like to get the biggest bag possible usually like a 12-in bag because it leaves me a lot of space to be able to tie knot at the top and that really keeps the icing in the bag really nice especially with your flood cuz sometimes when you're squeezing on the bag the flood comes out at the top so I like to tie knots if I have enough room so sometimes I fill the bag really high if I've got a lot of cookies to do so I've taken about a quarter of what I have in the icing maybe a little bit less and this is going to be my outline icing so I've colored it it's good to go we can bag it up I'm going to tie my knot here and the rest of the icing I'm going to use for my flood but I've got to thin it down with some water first so these are the tipless bags and you can see there's a seam running down and there's only one seam on this bag and it's really really thin it's not kind of folding or popping out of the bag and that's the difference between like a regular plastic Piping Bag and tipless bags there's only one seam to it and because if you have a really thick seam when you cut the bag it'll sort of pull the icing and it won't come out nice and smooth so here's the rest of my outline icing and I'm going to thin it down with some water so I just am adding a little bit of water at a time a little bit of water goes a long way with royal icing especially when it's kind of at that point where it's not quite outlin not quite flood so just very very little at a time and I'm going to stir it in very good and see how it's starting to get glossy and smooth again see how it's kind of melting it's that soft Peak is really soft like it's holding a peak but it just flops over this is way too soft for your outline so if you at this point when you first mix your icing together You' got to add a little bit of powdered sugar cuz this is a little bit too soft it won't hold your details like you want them too but this is not good enough for our flood so we do need to add some more water what we want our flood to do is settle nice and evenly so we don't want our flood to kind of have marks in it or lines we want our flood to be kind of settle level nice flat and smooth so I'm just going to keep adding water until I find that it's coming to the right consistency and I like doing it this way coloring my eyes ing taking some out for my outline the rest becomes my flood because I don't have to color two separate bowls and try to make them the exact same color here I'm using the exact same color one's a little bit thin down but the color is pretty much the same and it'll dry the same and you will not notice a difference so let's take a look at our flood here it's kind of still plopping off of that spatula so it's definitely not ready Some people prefer a thicker flood you know it's kind of melting together it takes a little bit of shaking and if you like a thicker flood or you're doing really small cookies like mini cookies this might be good for you because then you know it won't run off the side of your cookies but it's not quite what we want it's that plopping you don't really want that so this is kind of like the ribbon test that I do to see if my icing is ready or not so for me this is too stiff still so I'm going to add a little bit of more water and you can see it's really not that much water but it does make a big difference so here you need to start being careful about how much water is going in and right away you can see it's a lot looser when I'm scraping the icing together it's kind of flowing together and smoothing out now consistency is really hard to get right I still mess it up here and there because sometimes it looks good and as the icing sit it gets a little bit thicker sometimes get thinner the next day so there's all these factors but just think you can always add a little bit of water you can always add a little bit of powdered sugar to make it the right consistency okay so to test my flood icing to see if it's right I'm going to cut a line between the icing and see how it's kind of flowing together and that line is starting to disappear that gives me good indication that we're really close or this is about the right consistency and I'm going to pick it up and I'm going to slowly Let It Go it kind of plops down but it also ribbons and you see that ribboning of the icing and you see how it's sort of melting together and those lines are starting to disappear that's kind of the consistency you want to go to a little squiggle and it starts to melt into each other you can maybe add a touch more water at this point but sometimes I'll think about my set and think what kind of cookies if they're really big cookies I might do it a little bit thinner so the icing kind of flows faster and I can flood faster if I'm doing smaller cookies or I know have a lot of sections that are smaller to flood I might keep it at about this consistency a touch thicker just so the icing isn't too flowy and runs off the side of the cookie but you can see with a little jiggle it Smooths out perfectly so this is our Flood now importantly we're going to have have to cover this one for a little bit with a damp paper towel because we want the bubbles to rise so let it sit for 10 15 minutes or how long you can the longer the better but you can see all those bubbles here that have risen to the top the more loose your icing is the more bubbles you're going to get so what we want to do is just run our spatula at the top of the icing here and I'm just popping all the bubbles you can probably sit here and pop those bubbles forever there's going to be so many of them little ones underneath the icing that keep surfacing but don't worry about those ones too much just worry about the main big ones that you see on the surface you don't have to get all of them but this really helps if you're getting a lot of bubbles in your icing make sure you do this step and again while I'm doing my outline and I'm bagging it all and I've thinned down all my icing if I've got four or five colors going by the time I've mixed down all my icing to the flood consistency you know I do one color at a time I go back to the first color and all the bubbles have risen so you can see here my consistency is just perfect and we go ahead and we can bag that now we're going to do it the same way we put our tipless bag over top of our cup and you can see the difference I don't have to spoon this icing in it's just going to flow right into the bag from the bowl consistency takes a lot of practice the more cookies you do the more you'll realize what you like like I said some people like thicker ones I like a thinner one because I find it saves me time but it also depends on what I'm going to do in the cookie so larger cookies I will go with looser flooding cuz it saves me a lot of time trying to smooth it out and smaller cookies I keep it a little bit thicker and here we go we're just going to tie this up so if you don't have any space at the top to tie this um with a knot you can just get yourself a little clip so I have got these little bag clips here and you just clip them at top make sure to twist the bag a few times just so the icing does not come out and make sure you got a nice strong clip cuz you don't want it to pop open while you're pushing on your bag to flood now when we go to cut our bags we want to make sure the seam is in the middle and we want to flatten out the bag as much as possible so push that icing up a bit flatten the tip out nice and flat take a nice sharp pair of scissors and cut a very small hole we always start off small and we cut bigger as we need so you can see it's just a tiny little tip that I've cut off and then we're going to go and test our icing and what I always do after I make a small cut I will do a line and see maybe a couple lines to see if it's flowing nicely if the hole is too small it takes too much pressure is the icing curling when it's coming out of the tip then that means the hole is not big enough and we need to cut it slightly bigger so here's my outline that I've just drawn and now we're going to cut our flood bag and again we're going to do a little bit bigger because the flood we want the whole bit bigger cuz we want more icing to be coming out so not too big again we're not cutting this huge hole just slightly bigger and I'll show you the difference see how Loosely it comes out and it kind of Puddles there at the end and how it flows a lot smoother and Freer out of the bag so that's our flood and you can see it kind of spilling out of my bag there as well and again just to show you the difference here's my outline consistency and see that little Peak it's holding and then we go to our flood and if I do the same thing with my flood you can see the peak instantly almost disappears so that's the difference of what your outline and your flood look like so once you're finished decorating your cookies for the night and you got to continue tomorrow you can wipe your tip clean so I usually use like a damp paper towel and then I flatten the tip as much as I can I'm pushing the icing all the way up in the bag and then I will fold the tip over and kind of roll it up and this will keep my icing from leaking out and then I'll take a freezer Ziploc bag one of these really big Ziploc bags and then I'll take that kind of folded bag and they don't always stay if you have a lot of icing sometimes it doesn't but I try to fold it up as much as I can and kind of push it into the corner and then I'll do the same with the other bag as well I'll just kind of fold it up as much as I can and usually if you've done a bunch of decorating you won't have like a full bag of icing left and then I just fold it up again and I'll put in the Ziploc bag and I'll do the with all my colors and I'll stick it in the fridge until I'm ready to decorate the next day the reason I refrigerate them I find that it separates less sometimes your flat icing tends to separate the color a little bit from the actual icing and you got to knead it together and it's totally fine if it does that but I find putting them in the fridge when I'm not using them it really helps that from happening now if I didn't use all my icing I can always just put in a container so I'm going to freeze this icing for another day so I've put it in a container here I put a piece of s wrap and I'm going to touch the Saran Wrap to the icing and make sure it's nice and flat to the sides and then I'm going to put the lid on top and freeze this icing this is a great way to store any excess icing that you have and you can use at a later date and it lasts for like 2 to 3 months and it's totally fine you can defrost it on the counter and then go ahead and use it [Music] again now let's see our outline here it's looking pretty good it's holding it shape it's flowing nicely it's not breaking on me if your outline is breaking it could be too dry so too much powdered sugar it's too stiff and if it's flowing too fast then it's too loose and then we're going to go ahead with my flood and we can see as well the flood is kind of coming out nicely nice and glossy and smooth that color is really nice and bright red and a little tip too if you want a nice bright red if if I find my red went a little bit too dark or I'm worried it's going to get too dark what I like to do is add a touch of lemon yellow the really bright yellow and I find that it brightens it up just a little bit and it really works well especially cuz for Christmas red I really love like those bright red or for Valentine's Day that's what I usually do to my Reds to make a nice bright vibrant [Music] red so you can see this flood is almost done here and you can see there's still lines in there so this is a little bit stiffer than normally but I'm going to be using this set for um some smaller cookies that I want to do so I don't want to make it too loose but with that scribe giving a little bit of a jiggle you can see how smooth it's come so if you want to not do so much scribe work you can do a little bit looser and it just turned out so beautiful the color looks great the flood looks amazing and this will be the best oy icing you've ever tasted now this is my cookie fully dry and look at that icing it just looks beautiful I'll have the full recipe and steps written in the description of the video I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and you give my icing a try if you love the icing please let me know in the comments and we'll see you in the next tutorial happy baking [Music]

Channel: Little Cookie Co

Views: 148,554

Keywords: royal icing, decorated cookies, royal icing recipe, how to make royal icing, icing consistency

Id: HxGBClkllNE

Length: 23min 44sec (1424 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 19 2023