Make Royal Icing from Scratch | A Complete Tutorial with Ceri Griffiths

[Music] hello and welcome to cake doctor well as you know I'm Carol Griffiths and one of my expertise as a doctor is wrong icing I've had lots of requests asking how to make royal icing now there are plenty premixes out there on the market but what I want to do is I want to show you how to make royal icing from scratch I use icing sugar some of you call it confection sugar some call it powdered sugar lemon juice and I'm using egg whites or the egg albumin all I've done is I've cracked eggs separated the yolk from the white the white is the album in the albumin is what we're going to use and I'll talk about each of those as we go forward but before we start I know when you're making roll icing you may not always have a video in front of you may or not always have your iPad or your technology to view so what I've done is on the wrong icing section of the cake doctor blog I've actually written and printed and it's a downloadable free handout and heart of how to make royal icing the only difference here is on the very last section I've referred to glycerine because if you're coating a cake in glycerin sorry if you're coating a cake in royal icing then the addition of glycerin will make the roll icing softer and crumble when it's dried out rather than drying out completely solid now there is a bit of a caveat on that if you're coating cakes then it's fine to use glycerin in the mix if you're doing pipe flowers string worth extension work run out flood work any of those I wouldn't add the glycerin okay but in this video I'm making just regular unadulterated royal icing so let's talk about a few things we've got here okay this is powdered sugar powdered sugar I see sugar confectioner sugar it's the consistency of talcum powder this is what we're talking about now there are companies out there who do premix is where all you do is add the water some of them actually do have colored icing so that when you mix it up it will already be a certain color but we're working with white here because that was water it uses a so that's that one next lemon juice in this glass I've got two teaspoons of lemon juice you can use it measure or you can just use a regular teaspoon as I've done here it's an approximate it's two teaspoons it's the acid in the ingredient this is lemon juice I haven't squeezed the lemon I've gone to the local store and I've just bought lemon juice in a bottle or one of those little squeezy containers you can use that if you do have real lemons all I would say is once you squeeze the lemon pass the lemon juice through some fabric or something or maybe a tea strainer just make sure there's no bits in it there's no problem using real lemon juice or pre-bought lemon juice that's not lemon cordial or lemon squash it's actual lemon citric from the fruit there's a reason why it's in there and that is because when it's combined with the egg white it helps align all of proteins up this isn't a science lesson but just know there is a reason for it to be in there now third and lastly is actually egg albumen or egg white now in the recipe I have weighed this this is actually we've 60 grams it is 60 grams and what I've done is I've separated my egg yolk from my egg white this is a white the albumin I've weighed my glasses erode it on my metric scales and then I've weighed 60 grams I've done it that way because if I say two eggs to you then someone may pick up large eggs someone pick up medium eggs eggs in Britain might be a different size and somewhere else in the country so I know that by weighing it as a gram measurement you have an exact measure to do now deffend something else we need to talk about too is everything that you use needs to be grease free for royal icing grease will destroy royal icing so make sure you've given everything clot soap you wash now I have a machine here I'm using a cane wood chef I use camera chef a lot I've used it ever since my college days that's what I'm using for this you can use any stand-up bench mixer you can mix royal icing by hand but you'll have arms like Popeye at the end of it so go ahead get bench mixer do not try to use a hand mixer because as you do it it's going to vibrate and possibly injure your wrist also it might burn the engine out because it's not meant to be for doing wrong I sing all things that's wrong if you're looking as an indicator to buy what buy bench one if it's strong enough to make dough and it would have a dough hook with it as one of the adaptions then it's strong enough to do roll I say okay now the other thing we need to talk about is we use a beater now this is a KBT because obviously it's Kenwood whatever brand you've got will have either a Ken a K beater or a paddle we're looking for one of these don't use a balloon whisk if you use a balloon whisk what will happen is you will incorporate far too much air within the royal icing and it'll be pretty much useless for what you want slow and steady where the paddle is what you need there are paddles out there that have a silicon blade around them I personally don't use the my I would rather stop my machine and scrape down the mixture as you're going to see me do however it's your choice if you've got one with the silicon blade go ahead and try it I don't know how effective they are never used one with royal icing so let's get on with the process now first thing I'm going to do before I do anything else is I'm going to put my egg whites directly into my bowl and then I'm going to put my lemon juice directly in with it now I do that because what I want to do is to break up the egg whites slightly as you know eggs when you crack them some bits are thicker some bits of thinner some bits of watery you want to get that all a bit looser I also use pasteurized eggs I don't know whether you can get pasteurized eggs in the country you're in but in Britain we're lucky enough to have pasteurized eggs the trouble is that if an egg isn't being cooked then you've got the possibility of problems with the egg egg white but in this process I'm using pasteurized okay if you're using your own eggs from say you've got chickens be cautious you can't tell how the egg doesn't necessarily mean it's healthy baguettes come from a healthy chicken if you buy from a supermarket or a big market chain you'll probably find they are sterilized a pasteurized on Sarai's pasteurized okay so I put this on I'm just gonna let this value for you little bit I'm not trying to create meringue what I'm trying to do is break up the egg white in Tibet [Applause] that's probably enough so if I take that up to the Camry you can see it's a bit of a slurry now but it's a lot what I would call looser and by looser I mean as the egg white isn't a stringy isn't as doughy the next thing I do now is I put all of my egg whites in there cloud of death all of them in this give that a wipeout say I need that later on now if I was to put this directly onto my machine now you would have this massive cloud of icing sugar going all over the place you don't want to do that that spends a lot of time cleaning up what you do is leave it sit for a few minutes and then come in with your spatula and actually just mix it through until this bit of an ugly sticky mess but what you tried to do is to get the sugars to start being dissolved by that albumin lemon mix takes a few minutes what you could do is you could just put this on go away for a minute and come back and it will have started dissolving it but this is just a really good way to prevent it all blowing all over the place I'm just cutting my palette knife Batchelor through the mixture as you can see it is coming together it's a little long time just stand this up so I can this quickly it's gonna come together in sort of a breadcrumb e-type effect so if we look here see it's no longer a powder it's a bit lumpy at this stage it's fine to use sprayed that back into the bowl we don't want to lose any now anything less than 500 grams of raw icing 500 grams of icing sugar which this is to make realizing it's probably too small to do on a machine because the beta will be able to reach the bottom of the bowl below 500 grams of icing sugar I actually do it by hand 500 grams and above I do it by machine so put my machine Bowl on bring it down now I'm going to turn it on to a slow speed now the reason we do slow is because firstly we don't want a big cloud of dust coming out at us and also when the icing sugar is first absorbed by the sugar is actually quite a tough mixture you don't really want to be harming your engine on your mixer you don't want to burn the engine out but just by letting it go slowly straight away it'll start to combine all of those ingredients together so after a few seconds it will begin to look like this as you can see it's quite a big lump has come together it's important to keep scraping down because what will happen is the wetter ingredients will grip the paddle the drier ingredients will grip the bottom of the bowl and we don't want that we want a nice even combined so just go in there make sure everything is coming together and it's quite a firm paste like consistency at this point if you can see this is quite solid this is not realizing yet okay this this is just a place to just scrape this off now when you're using any equipment whilst making royal icing I would advise you to put the pieces like this into a fold of kitchen towel or a fold of a damp tea towel the reason I do this is because while I'm waiting for the royal icing to mix that's gonna crusts if I then scrape the ball down again I'm adding crumbs into my royal icing mix which is a very bad thing today well this is mixing for a few minutes let's talk about a couple of other things once the roll icing is made from we finished and ready to go I always transfer it to a clean bowl I usually get some plastic wrap or saran wrap and laid on the surface of the wall icing put another layer over the top and put a damp tea towel on the top of that what that will do is it will prevent it pressing and preventing and drying out and then I can keep on using it from that bowl if I'm storing it overnight I can scrape the ball down do exactly the same process some people will put a plate on top of the bowl just to give it a bit of a seal I personally don't store my royal icing in the refrigerator unless we're having an incredibly hot summer I live in Britain so that's a very rare scenario but I do know some of you are in very hot climates yes you can put raw icing in the fridge for what I would say is take it out first thing in the morning because wrong icing is best used at room temperature okay I don't freeze roll icing I know there's one or two people who do I do not all so it's worth saying at this point you've got your egg albumen in this product I don't keep my royal icing past four or five days I make smaller amounts I make them more often if I make a big batch of it and it's standing around I potentially have got a problem I could start pouring food poisoning because you wouldn't leave a raw egg out on your counter would you let's see how this is doing turn this off to show you how we're developing this as you can see now it's becoming more like royal icing this is this is what you're expecting to see service cleaners down a bit now the recipe I'm making here which is 60 grams of egg white two teaspoons of lemon juice 500 grams of icing sugar is to make a fairly stiff consistency because I believe that if I start with a stiff consistency I can then soften it down to make the other consistencies I might use so as you can see now this is coming together but as I said it is quite a sift consistency and that is on purpose and that's why I've measured everything from it's far more useful to start with the stiff consistency and then work it from there then keep my equipment covered with damper now probably got about another minute to go on this like you'd imagine but did this worth testing as we go now you heard me mention their consistency now I get a lot of questions about what is the correct consistency there isn't really an answer to my question because the correct consistency will be the consistency for the job you were doing at the time also what is your humidity and what heater your hands you've got hot hands you've got cold hands all of these do affect consistency of icing if I've got one bowl of icing in it's the middle of winter it's going to be firmer than the same bowl of icing at the height of summer because the cold legal icing is the firmer it is your hotter this the softer it is so if I'm holding a bag of icing I have very hands it's going to get warm on me there are three main consistencies people talk about and that sperm beep soft people run out run out sometimes referred to as flood and we're going to be looking at those as we go along now so your seam indication what it is use those as three key markers for what the consistency should be also your piping ice say you doing borders or stream work or pressure piping you need to adjust your consistency to be the size of the bag that you're using or the size of the piping tip because if I'm piping with a very small piping tip there is no way I'm gonna get stuff law-license really if I'm piping to the larger piping bag and a larger piping tip maybe I can go up and use a filmer people icing for example if I'm piping flowers I will use between soft and firm people icing because I want the icing to keep the consistency so that'll actually make the flowers look crisper in they'll hold their shape so let's have a look and see how will you doing here I did that just to use centrifugal force to take the icing away from the betta that's just turn this around I'm done with you for the moment so if I look at this now this is stiff stiff royal icing sippy crawl icing you will see that as I hold it up see these Peaks here these Peaks here standing up on at holding their shape this is stiff royal icing or firm peak royal icing now the only times I use firm peak royal icing would be if I'm doing the very first coat of a wedding cake in royal icing because that would establish the foundation work and it would seal my cake other than that I would use it for piping flowers maybe but other than that that's my only uses for it oops a fling over there so let's transfer this to a glass bowl so you can actually see the different stages I'm working on as I'm working with it probably don't need all that actually because I'm going to have to change consistency as we go along it off now whenever you're not working with all icing make sure that the bowl is covered with a damp cloth very important it likes to dry out it likes to crust that is the nature of royal icing as well that's ones item so here we have the wrong I think as I said this is what I recall peak roll icing so if I lift this up it's gonna hold its shape it's going to let's might find some where you can see it there you go it's going to pretty much hold it spike I mean that's what I'm looking for it needs to be firm hold it straight that's the stuff that I use for firm deep royal icing now depending on what job I'm doing will depends on how I relax this down to the softer peak now if I'm intending to do work that's going to be part of run out collars run out sections pieces are going to be suspended away from the cake they need the most strength that can possibly have so I could just take extra egg white directs to albumin to dilute it down however normally I can just use little bits of water and it's usually cooled boiled cold water I would use or I tend to use bottled water in the workshop because I know that it's already cold I'd have to wait around for it to work now do not pick up a jug and just pour pour water in you'll find that raw lighting changes consistency incredibly quickly so I tend to use a teaspoon to put it in I do know that one of the other doctors Nicholas Lord he uses a pump spray of water and that another way to soften it down so I'm just gonna work this in a little bit of a stir just to make sure it's cleaned down the side now obviously if you were doing a large batch of icing you wouldn't change consistency in the bowl you would change it on the machine but I mean I've only got probably 250 grams here so already you can see now if I try and lift this up now it's all flopping all over the place as you might get you one of the spikes like I had before okay as you can see it falls over I sometimes tell my students this is looking like meringue or you know the soft peach ice cream you find but this to me is soft peak icing this is the most useful version of icing that you'll probably use most people find they use this second or third coat their cake this is what it's easier to pipe borders with because it will flow really quite nicely out at the end of a piping bag there go now the next consistency I'm going to look at is actually soft piano sake is flood icing or flow or run out this is the consistency that I would flood cookies with that I would actually flood areas of a collar or sections with I would flood the board or the drum with if I was in a competition piece this is flood flow run out all of those are the same thing you just need to know which one they are now as you saw I went from firm peak icing to soft peak lighting just with two teaspoons of water so be careful now obviously if you go too far the answer is add more powdered sugar and then you'll return it back to its original consistency now when you're making flood or flow you saw previously that I was beating don't beat stir this and the reason I'm stirring it is because I'm trying to incorporate less air if I incorporate more air I'm going to have to let this icing sit longer because the longer it sits the more the air bubbles will settle out of it so I've gone past soft and I'm heading towards flood or flow at this moment that was one teaspoon fall it's not quite there yet and remember I'm not giving you an exact science here because every volume is going to require different liquid tabot quantity to it to bring it to the consistency you want so again I added another teaspoon and I'm just stirring away almost there novice sir I think possibly one more teaspoon and yes I do know I'm making this look easy to be honest with you it's experience hopefully once you've done it once or twice you will actually find the right balance of consistency for your hand strength all the projects you're working with so I would say this is going to do it at this point so I think that's about right and the reason we I think that is because if I now Paul that's very typical so you say if I pull a palette knife through its gonna flow back into itself and give me a nice even surface now you will hear terms like a 10 count or a 15 count what that means has turned it this way is if I pull this through and go 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 within 10 counts this should all merge back together when I was in college we used to have what was called 5 knock so we could do the same thing lift the ball up and go 1 2 3 4 5 and it would have the same effect it would go back to smooth there are lots and lots of different ways of doing it now I would also say if I'm doing flood work for a run out caller I would probably have it slightly softer than this if I was flooding a cookie for me I like about this consistency because I don't want to moisture too much moisture to soak into my cookie so remember this is the consistency of flood or flow now it's very tempting to make it softer so it flows easier but the thing is the easier it flows the longer it's going to take to dry because more moisture it's got in it if you have it any thicker than this you're not going to be able to get it to a nice smooth surface when finished so just play around with this consistency as per the job you're going to do so we talked about the ingredients I've talked about the recipe sheet which you have there if I was going to add glycerin what I would do is I would add glycerin when it's at this stage in the bowl I wouldn't add it at this stage and I wouldn't be adding it to run out a flow or flood anyway and what I do is I think in the recipe here I say up to two teaspoons of glycerin let me just make sure I've got that right okay for this recipe I've said one teaspoon of glycerin for every 500 grams of raw icing so that's one classing inspire hundred grams what I've just done you could push that as far as two teaspoons should you wish just be aware that when when the cake is dried and it will be dried when you cut it it will then crumble if you don't put less written into the coating of a roll ice cake it will be really hard work to cut into it so hopefully that's address some questions we've talked about machines we've talked about ingredients we've made the recipe to show you that the recipe I put online for you actually gives you raw icing as I said it would I've shown you how to go from stiff peak to soft peak to run out or flood if there are any other questions please let me know and I look forward to seeing you on the next cake book live happy piping guys you

Channel: Ceri Griffiths

Views: 511,148

Keywords: Ceri Griffiths, Cake, Cake Decorating, Shows, Review, Sugarcraft, Icing, Confectionery, Baking, cake doctor, icing, icing recipe, Katy Sue Design

Id: cRUsa3hhNqc

Length: 25min 0sec (1500 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018