Common Royal Icing Mistakes - how to troubleshoot common problems with royal icing

what's up guys Lisa he of Borderlands Bakery and in this video we're going to talk about some of the most common issues that people experience when working with royal icing some of the things I hear that you guys struggle the most with is icing bleeding or color bleed or butter bleed craters we all hate craters and issues where your icing is not drying or it feels or looks porous and kind of spongy first of all what is icing bleed or butter bleed they're slightly different things so let's talk about color or IC bleeding first first of all what is color bleed or butter bleed those are actually two different things with different causes so let's talk about icing bleed first icing bleed is when you pipe two colors of icing next to each other or on top of each other and the color seems to leech into each other causing this really unsightly tiedye look that you don't want this happens on the actual icing itself and it's not something that's a part of the cookie now one of the most important things that anybody can ever do for any of these problems whether it be icing underbeat overbeat even craters is really focusing on getting a very solid structurally sound base icing I don't feel like this is talked about in left in our industry I feel like we focus on the symptoms so much we're not getting to the root cause of the problems that you guys are experiencing if you create a very robust base icing it's going to solve like 90% of the problems that you're experiencing so what do I mean when I'm telling you to create a robust or structurally sound base icing when we create royal icing we create batches and we start with a batch of Base icing this is the base that we create it's usually thicker and it's something that we take from to mix colors and flood consistencies with and it's something that we all start out with to make your base icing most of the ingredients are pretty much the same across the board but the ratio and the technique is different from Baker to Baker if you want to learn how to make icing we've got classes on that you can check us out baking withth borderlands.com but the thing to look out for is you don't want to be under or overbeating your base icing there are a lot of schools of thought on this and there are factors like environment and equipment and ingredients that will impact your icing so the only way to find out if something works for you is actually to do it yourself go through that trial and error period look at your symptoms depending on what symptoms you get come back and try to troubleshoot them either at when you're doing the cookies or if nothing else is working your Bas icing is likely the culprit so what do I look for in a base icing when you're first starting to create your icing everything looks kind of more translucent and not thick or marshmallow fluff like which is the final consistency that I look for in my icing I make my icing in a stand mixer with a paddle attachment and I'm done in about 3 to 4 minutes there are people who beat their icing for 10 minutes I don't do that it's never worked for me I find that when I beat my icing for more than 5 minutes it becomes too voluminous I've overacted the mering powder in my icing causing a porous structure in my icing resulting in my icing not fully drying and instead it holds it shape it stays pretty puffy but even after 2 days you put your finger in it and it's spongy and it has not dried at all you want to look for icing that's changed States from a translucent thick spackle material to something that's fluffier white relatively dense and also fluffy and I call it marshmallow fluff and we'll throw up um a video or photo of that getting your icing to that perfect consistency is going to reduce cratering it's going to reduce air bubbles it's also going to reduce your bleeding if you want to layer colors of icing next to each other or on top of each other ensuring that your icing is at the right consistency and the base icing is correct is going to help you a lot the next step is making sure that after you've mixed your colors you're not letting them sit for more than a couple hours at a time before using them when you let your icing sit it begins to separate all the heavier stuff is going to sink to the bottom all the lighter stuff is going to sink to the top uh sink to the top float to the top and once it separates it's not structurally sound anymore so I tell people to always massage their bags of icing before they get ready to decorate that's going to give you an icing that is more homogeneous and more strally sound the other thing that's going to reduce your bleeding is the order and the time that you wait between layers assuming your base icing is at the correct consistency I'm going to say that so many times throughout this video don't get tired of me I just really want to drive that point home but assuming that your base icing is at the correct consistency you want to layer your icing strategically if you are putting different colors down next to each other kind of like a wet on wet technique do that right away one after the other no problem if you're layering icing on top of each other I recommend putting down the base layer allowing that to crust but not fully dry and then putting the next layer on the reason why is because the moisture levels are more similar for icing that's just crusted and fresh icing versus icing that's just dried and fresh icing sometimes if your bottom layer is too dry it'll pull moisture from the top layer into the bottom layer causing bleeding now the other thing that people experience is butter bleed butter bleed is something that happens when oils from the cookie itself cuz there's no fat in royal icing but oil or fat from the cookie itself leeches upwards into your icing causing these unsightly splotches in your icing if you have a structurally sound icing to begin with that should solve pretty much all of your butter bed problems however the other things that you need to look out for is making sure that you're adequately baking your cookies some of us like a very underbaked cookie and that means you've got fat in a state that's not fully kind of used up or activated it's going to leech down or up and that could potentially impact your cookies sometimes I've seen recipes that are very very very high fat and you can tell because they don't hold their shave very well they tend to spread a little bit more they are so tasty but it's not as easy to decorate those cookies with royal icing because a lot of fat leeches upwards I have seen people put their baked cookies on paper towels to help absorb some excess fat and that's worked for a lot of people but all of my butter bleed problems went away once I moved to a royal icing that uses mering powder instead of egg whites so I used to use egg whites both fresh and pasteurized as a part of my Royal ice recipe over 10 years ago at this point and I switched because I couldn't get rid of the butter bleed problem after I switched and I made sure my base icing was correct I never had it again one of the symptoms that people don't talk about a lot is when your icing looks a little bit translucent or you've got streaky icing now streaky Icing by itself is not the only indicator of improperly mixed base icing it could be just icing that's separated and you've let your IC IC in sit before piping it that could be one of the issues with streaky or translucent icing but more often than not I notice people are under beating or under mixing their base icing your base icing I talked about how it moves from being translucent to being thick to being like white and fluffy you want to get it to White and fluffy if you stop before it gets that point your icing is going to be more translucent and that's also going to encourage bleeding cuz there's not enough structure to hold everything up one of the big Hot Topics in our industry are craters cratering is something that happens when we pipe micing and it either divots in a large area or it forms these craters or holes in small areas craters are super common in small areas of icing and a couple of ways to prevent them aside from having a good base icing is getting air flow on it immediately to help it set so that means using a tabletop fan or using a dehydrator I've even heard of some people putting their um freshly iced cookies in the oven on the warm setting to help things crust and set faster you also want to make sure that the icing consistency you're using for those areas is as thick as you can possibly manage to work with the thicker your icing the lower the probability of cratering I see cratering happening a lot in small details and a lot of lettering most of the time time it's because it's just not thick enough or you may have also oversaturated your icing with too much food color a lot of people want to get those very bright Reds or dark blacks or deep navies and we end up putting a bunch of food color into our icing and when we're working with details maybe you're only mixing this much Icing by using a ton of food color when the ratio of food color to icing is too high it messes with the structural Integrity of your icing promoting craters oversaturating your icing with too much food color can also cause bleeding issues if you want to create a bright vibrant color and you're like I'm really having trouble and struggling with creating that color keep in mind that if you're working with blacks red Navy you want to give it a little bit of time to develop just like how hair dye requires processing time food color especially those deep ton and bright tones require a little bit of extra time now of course using a highly pigmented color like the sugar art Master Elites is going to help you achieve that a little bit easier but with the Reds blacks navies it's still going to be a harder so I recommend coloring it a couple Shades under the final tone that you want to get giving it about half an hour to an hour to develop in the Piping Bag look at it after it's had a moment to develop and then mix it before you actually pipe with it I think that's going to take you um a long way and reduce cratering and bleeding craters can also happen if you're under mixing your base icing or over mixing your base icing so goes back to the base icing when it's under miixed it becomes translucent it's not structurally sound but if you over mix we also get an issue where there's just way too much air in our royal icing now I know there are some people that says you can't possibly over mix icing I don't know how it's not possible because like we've seen it happen over and over again um if anyone believes that this does not exist I welcome that discussion in the comment section I'm really curious to actually see videos of people not over mixing their icing because for me the moment I move Beyond 5 minutes of beating it at high it fluffs up and when I use it it never dries so you end up with this really puffy icing layer that kind of settles even within in 3 days usually Myro icing is fully dry in 24 hours but if you've overbeat it it's never going to dry and it doesn't matter how humid it is or how non humid it is it's just never going to dry fully and if it appears dry if you put your finger in it it's going to crumble like a mering cookie and look very porous if you take a cross-section of it that could also be one of the reasons why you're getting more craters or air bubbles in your icing now finally I also want to talk about the concept of air bubbles in your royal icing we're going to go back to that base icing so my base icing recipe you get this really thick spackle texture when you're done with it and it stores really well it doesn't separate very quickly because it's so thick and because I'm not using a whisk and I'm not vigorously beating it for a long time I don't incorporate too much excess air into my icing I feel that people run into air bubble issues when they are mixing it down to a a flood thinner consistency and they're like mixing pretty vigorously introducing a lot of air bubbles into the icing during that process I say when you're mixing use more of a folding motion rather than like a crazy vigorous mixing motion and I also recommend that you use a paddle attachment instead of whisk attachment for your Bas icing adding too much water and mixing too vigorously at the same time is going to create a lot of air bubbles the other thing to consider is when you're piping or flooding especially and you want to reduce the air bubbles make sure that the hole that you cut sometimes it's very tempting to cut a larger hole and just go fast and flood it in as fast as possible but if you have a larger hole it doesn't give an opportunity for any extra air bubbles to break as it exits the Piping Bag so an appropriate Siz hole will also help break some of those air bubbles as you pipe that was a lot of information but hopefully that helped and gave you some things to think about about as it relates to some of the struggles that we have when it comes to royal icing if you have any additional things obviously I didn't hit every single thing and I definitely missed stuff please leave them in the comments section and if you found this video helpful don't forget to like and also subscribe to our channel for more videos in the future

Channel: Borderlands Bakery

Views: 11,020

Keywords: royal icing troubleshooting, problems with royal icing, royal icing mistake, common icing mistakes, craters in royal icing, icing bleed, butter bleed, color bleed, dough spreads, sugar cookie dough spread

Id: X0fg1vlhboc

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023