So, this is a little story of how to totally mess up and frustrate yourself in the medium that is- Royal Icing.
First of all, what is Royal Icing… Royal Icing is a mixture of powdered sugar, meringue powder or egg whites and water (sometimes lemon juice is added as well). It is commonly used for piping flowers, and is the most-used icing in the Wilton Course 2 classes. If you have ever eaten those hard, sugary flowers (violets, rosebuds, etc…) on top of cupcakes, they were probably made from royal icing. There are other uses for royal icing that I can get into another time, including using it just to cover cookies, but this is really about royal icing for piped flowers.
So with essentially just THREE ingredients in the recipe, one of which was water, I figured how hard could this be to make?! Well, a lot harder than it should be, and a lot more frustrating than I realized. But this is also a little tale of redemption and how I recognized and fixed the disaster that was my first royal icing nightmare.
Royal icing is much more fickle than you would expect. The instructions I received were as follows:
1 lb sifted powdered (confectioners) sugar
3 level tablespoons Meringue Powder (I use Wilton’s Meringue powder available at Michaels or any baking store)
4-6 tablespoons of lukewarm water
mix at low speed
Sounds easy enough, so how did it all end in tears? (ok, not really, but almost)
First you need to sift your powdered sugar- twice! Ok, a bit of a pain, but not too hard to manage. I had done that- check. Add Meringue powder, again simple enough. Now this was the part I was warned about… the water. You don’t want to add too much water, otherwise you will have watery royal icing and you will not be able to pipe with it. I still ended up using 6 tablespoons. And after I had all three ingredients in the bowl, it was time to mix. I took my trusty hand mixer and mixed away. It didn’t last that long, the royal icing gets hard, and it gets stuck in the beaters. I thought I had mixed it enough according to my directions. So before my hand mixer broke, I stopped, colored it and put it in airtight containers. And THAT was my critical error.
This is what the royal icing looked liked.
This is what royal icing SHOULD NOT look like
When I went to class, my teacher told me my icing was too dry. She added some water and stirred it in. When I went to pipe it, it was fairly stiff, but then the shape did not hold, so I ended up getting flowers that looked as if they had melted in the heat.
This is what flowers look like when your royal icing is not the right consistency
Of course at this point I did not understand what I had done wrong. I thought the teacher had just added too much water. So I made the recipe again, this time making it worse (yes, this is possible). Instead of using my hand mixer, I tried to mix the entire batch of icing by HAND.
Somehow something I thought was bad, got even worse! Have you ever tried to pipe cement? Because frankly, this felt like PIPING CEMENT! I burst 3 bags and had massive cramps in my hand. I swore and thought I would never pipe a flower again. It was the most frustrating day of my short-lived baking days. I felt defeated and incompetent and frankly I couldn’t understand why anyone would use this stuff- – -ah, the misery.
But then I got a bit of sleep and did something clever…. I googled it. Thankfully some others had written blogs and responded to online questions before me and it turns out you really do need an electric mixer to make royal icing. But I would say not only do you need an electric mixer, I would GET A STAND MIXER! I REPEAT- GET A STAND MIXER!!!
So, I dumped my cement mixture (aka disaster of royal icing) into my trusty Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Using the PADDLE ATTACHMENTS I just let the glorious mixer do its job. My advice to anyone in this process is to SET THE MIXER ON AND WALK AWAY (really)… go to the bathroom… do SOMETHING that takes about 5 minutes or so. (But if you do go to the bathroom, please don’t forget to wash your hands!) EVENTUALLY the icing will mix well enough to look smooth, almost fluffy and it will form stiff peaks.
Redemption! Turn off the mixer and check the icing. If the peaks droop, mix a bit more, if they stand up without drooping (stiff peaks) you are golden.
almost ready, but not quite
Finished mixing and ready to go!
(Tip: If you have in fact added too much water, just toss in a bit more powered sugar and that will help to fix the icing)
Fill your bag with this soft, luscious, easy-to-pipe icing and make your favorite flowers. They will be much easier to pipe and will stiffen up and look beautiful.
Assorted flowers piped with royal icing
Tip: While piping, I would have a zip-lock bag nearby. When you are not using one of your bags, put it in the bag and seal it to prevent the icing from drying out, becoming hard and unusable. If your tips have hardened icing in them, just put them in a cup of hot water and the icing will dissolve and the tips will be clean in no time and with little effort.
The Cake Cutie 