How to Make and Use Royal Icing | Bite Size

ah you guys it's almost like i really like baking or something [Music] hi i'm erin j mcdowell and welcome to this episode of bake it up a notch bite size these are short form episodes where we take a deeper dive into subjects that you want to know about and this particular one is one that i love to talk about we are going to talk about royal icing i think royal icing is a little bit misunderstood and sometimes people might think it's actually more complicated than it really is but it's actually so easy and can produce so many wonderful effects so today we're going to show you how to make royal icing desired consistencies and of course we're also going to show you some fun ways to use it if this sounds like something you're interested in or if you've loved past episodes of bake it up a notch do me a favor and click like and subscribe so you can be made aware as new episodes become available each month alright let's get baking royal icing is actually incredibly simple and easy to make and it has just a couple of ingredients confectioners sugar and egg whites and then often a little bit of water i also have some vanilla extract here i'm going to be using for flavoring you can use flavoring you can use other extracts sometimes people just leave it perfectly plain depending on how they're using it royal icing is usually used for a few different techniques it's sort of like sugary cement if you make it really really thick it can really be kind of lacquered on piped on spread on in lots of different ways it's what i use to hold my gingerbread houses together but if you have a thinner consistency you can use it for dipping pastries or cookies and of course for using lovely techniques like flooding which is what we're going to show in this episode today before we can do that we need to make our royal icing and it's going to start with some egg whites now if you don't want to use egg whites these are pasteurized egg whites and they don't necessarily get cooked in this process and i know that that can actually really bother a lot of folks so there is a way to do this without egg whites it's with meringue powder meringue powder is dehydrated egg whites we talk about it in our meringue episode of bake it up a notch so if you're somebody who's a little bit squeamish about the idea of using raw eggs that's the way to go you can get meringue powder of course online or in the baking supply section of most craft stores what we're going to do is we're going to start by whipping the egg whites if you were using meringue powder you would add a little bit of water and whip those two together what we want to do is get them a little bit frothy before we start adding our powdered sugar i'm gonna add my vanilla extract in while it's whipping too if you're not using any flavoring you can just skip that and whip with the egg whites alone once our egg whites are nice and frothy and they've got a little bit of aeration we can start adding our powdered sugar gradually the only reason we're adding it gradually is because there's a lot of it it's really the base of this icing so it's really important that we don't add too much at a time or we're going to get a sugar shower [Music] another way you can reduce the sugar shower is by kind of starting it like in a pulse when you first start mixing that way there isn't like one quick move of your attachment that's gonna run in and jump it all up once we start adding our powdered sugar really what we're doing is we're just trying to mix it to combine depending on what you're using the royal icing for you're going to want either a really thick consistency almost thick and fluffy that would be if you were making a gingerbread house and assembling it in that way or if you're using it for something like flooding you're going to want a little bit of a thinner consistency this is the messiest way i could have done this when a professional like can't add sugar to a bowl this time on food 52. [Music] [Applause] the consistency of your royal icing is going to depend on what you're using it for so this is at the thicker stage right now really nice and thick and fluffy that is what i would use if i was going to assemble a gingerbread house it's going to be thick enough to easily pipe and put onto our houses but a thicker icing is going to set up firmer faster but i'm going to use a flooding consistency today so i'm going to go ahead and put it back on you can continue to thin your royal icing with either a more egg whites or i just usually use water we've got enough egg white in there to kind of do the job that the egg white does which is going to make this icing really beautiful and shiny and it's going to help it set nice and firm so we can use water for the remainder of thinning it out and getting it to that right consistency remember if you're going to add food coloring to your icing that's also going to add more liquid to it so if you want to add food coloring just make sure to maybe add a little less water than you think you need you can always add a little bit more once you've incorporated your food coloring whatever it does get too thin you can adjust the consistency thicker using more confectioner's sugar [Music] [Applause] so when you get it to the consistency that you want in this case we're flooding so what we're looking for is a consistency where as it falls onto itself that it sort of is reabsorbed without any kind of line it should be very fluid very soft but still thick enough to pipe that's exactly what we're looking for and when we get to the desired consistency whether it's that or whether it's the fluffier stuff that you're going to use more for icing it's ready to be stored in an airtight container but the most important thing to remember is that it needs to be covered directly this means taking plastic wrap and covering directly against the surface the way royal icing works is that it sets up due to a combination of the starch that's in the confectioners sugar and also the proteins that we've got in these egg whites it creates this beautiful shiny icing that sets very firm unfortunately it can also set firm in your bowl if it's exposed to enough air so we want to make sure that we cover it directly with plastic wrap making sure that it's not getting any major exposure to air so that it'll stay exactly the texture that we want it until we're ready to use it i'm going to go ahead and transfer this to some piping bags and we're going to start doing some flooding decoration on cookies if you want to dye your royal icing it's ready to die as soon as it's at the proper consistency but remember hold off a little bit of extra moisture if you need to if you're trying to get a really saturated bold color there are lots of different ways to use royal icing but one of the most common is to decorate cookies the technique specifically that i think a lot of people want to know about is called flooding flooding is a really lovely technique that produces a fairly flat even surface on the cookie and then you can use more royal icing on top to decorate it and create lots of different effects if you flood with multiple colors you can actually make a single cookie look like smooth and pretty but in different colors to kind of show what the shape is now there's a few different ways to flood so let's start with the easiest one first actually that's one other thing i want to talk about before i get started some of my pastry bags have small round piping tips on them and others have no tip at all when i first started playing around with flooding it was something i would do whenever i had a little extra royal icing so i never even messed with tips it's definitely possible to do it but if you want that super pristine wonderful look you're going to want to use a tip i'm going to show you some with both ways just to prove that you know there's not just one right way to do it so i'm going to cut a small opening from the end of my pastry bag and the first thing that you want to do is pipe an outer line on the cookie now this is important because for this first technique i have two different consistencies of icing i have a thicker icing to make the line around the outside and a thinner icing to do the flooding on the inside i think this is a little bit easier because it enables you to have a line that really holds firm but there is kind of a downside to this which is that the line is often visible on the cookie and so if you want that really pristine look we're going to show you the slightly more difficult way to do it next so the first thing we're going to do is just pipe a line of icing around the cookie i talk more about this style of piping also in our piping 101 episode of bake it up a notch but one of the things that's cool about royal icing is it really can kind of you can kind of guide it so you can be kind of piping a little farther than where you need just lay it down when you're done and if there's any kind of visible seam like you can see here you can just use a skewer a toothpick or the tip of a knife to kind of drag the icing where you want it and smooth out any lines like that now we would have a thinner consistency of the icing to put on the inside of the cookie and you you can let this set a little bit but one of the things i usually advise is by the time you've done a whole tray of cookies the ones where you pipe the line first are going to be set enough and ready to go also if you don't wait as much time in between them setting they're going to have a smoother overall look and line so we're just going to apply our thinner consistency of frosting all over the cookie and you can apply a little less than you need and then use your skewer or toothpick to drag it to your outside line you don't want to use too much it is called the flooding technique because ideally you would kind of flood the inner line with the icing but if you use too much it can even break this line and we don't want to do that so we don't want it then it will literally flood over we don't want that we want all the flooding to happen within the plane that we are creating oh my gosh this is so cute already so there you go that's our kind of easiest way to flood a cookie now we're gonna let this cookie set over here and you can see because i used the toothpick and i didn't wait too long in between these are some cookies that katie my wonderful helper made up stairs before and there's this bit of a line in them but again once we start decorating and putting other things over it you're not going to notice that line but if you want that really smooth look that's one way to achieve it the other way to achieve it is actually by just using one consistency of icing to flood the thinner consistency from the get-go i mentioned that this is a little bit trickier because it can be harder to maintain that line around the outside edge with this but with enough practice it really is a lovely and easy technique so we'll start by piping the line around the outside edge i might have gotten a little bit close to the edge and that's good to show can you come here really quick so see i piped too close to the edge and now it's dipping to the outside edge that's not ideal um because we're not going to be able to get any icing to stay there we didn't really create a wall there so because it's still wet i can touch it with my fingers and kind of move it where i want but i'm actually going to let this one set and take another cookie so because you know mistakes happen guys mistakes happen sometimes so what we want to do is we want to pipe but not too close to the edge because we want to avoid that happening again and then as soon as we complete the outside line we can just immediately start flooding the interior of the cookie and because we're using the same consistency of frosting it should kind of create a really seamless lovely look kind of all on its own without our help but you can also help it with the skewer if you need to so cute now what we want to do is we want to let these cookies set and we want to let them set until we are ready for any kind of finishing or topping that we're going to put on and i have some that are ready so let me grab them [Music] here i have some really sweet little strawberry cookies that i made um and this is a good example of using the multiple different colors um to achieve certain effects so now that my red icing has set i can pipe my green leaves on the surface of this and that way we kind of have this smooth cool effect but in two different colors which creates dimension and makes it look more like a real strawberry oh my god look how cute that strawberry looks from the overhead cam it's so adorable so in addition to adding these little this little greenery on the top i can also add some little strawberry seeds and because the icing beneath it has set we can just pipe right on top of it and it creates this sort of 3d super cool effect it's adorable it's the cutest little strawberry cookie you ever did see josh get out the heart again i love everything let's do some more [Music] here's another example of a cookie that was flooded with different colors and in this case we kind of left the lines more intentionally because we were trying to show three different flavors to make this look kind of like a neapolitan ice cream pop so there are so many opportunities and the main thing you want to remember is that you do need to give this royal icing a chance to dry the more royal icing there is meaning the larger the cookie the larger kind of the overall flood space the longer it's going to take for it to dry but typically royal icing sets up very quickly the one thing to be careful of is it is going to kind of set up on the surface first if you touch it while it's still not fully set it could actually break through kind of revealing looser icing on the bottom and you could kind of end up ruining your beautiful glossy effect so just allow them plenty of time to dry and then just get ready to have a lot of fun flooding [Music] thank you so much for joining me for this episode of bake it up a notch bite size where we talked all things royal icing remember when it comes to royal icing it's really about consistency but the icing itself couldn't be easier to make look for the ideal consistency for the technique you're trying to do and then just have a ton of fun i had so much fun decorating my cookies i've got my pineapple i've got my little ice cream pops i've got my lemons turned out so cute and i think my favorite are these sweet little strawberries that's really what's so cool about royal icing it's really like edible paint you can have so much fun and there are so many possibilities with it thank you so much for joining me for this episode and as always happy baking [Music] you

Channel: Food52

Views: 131,890

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, baking techniques, cookie decorating tutorials, royal icing types, bite size, bake it up a notch bite size, erin jeanne mcdowell, erin jeanne mcdowell royal icing, cookie icing tips, cookie icing recipe, icing tutorials, how to pipe with icing, best royal icing recipes, cookie art tutorial, how to use royal icing, how to use piping bags, how to store royal icing, how to flood icing, erin mcdowell cookies

Id: vLYL6wLJbcQ

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021