- Hey, I'm John Kanell,
and today on Preppy Kitchen,
I'm going to show you how to make and use Royal icing.
So let's get started.
For this classic icing, you'll need
three egg whites, some powdered sugar, flavoring,
I'm using vanilla, and if you're dying them,
you'll want to get some food coloring too.
First off, we're going to separate our eggs.
We want three egg whites for this recipe, and yes,
you can double it if you're making an extra big batch.
You do not want to break your yolks though,
so be very careful.
If you like to use an egg separator, go ahead.
I find that clean hands work really well.
Okay, I'll do the best practice.
Best practice is to add the egg white
into the bowl one at a time,
just in case the unthinkable happens and a yolk breaks,
you won't be brokenhearted.
Real icing does use raw eggs.
If you have any concerns, go ahead and pasteurize the eggs.
It's really easy, just bring a little pot of water
to 140, keep it at 140, and then you're going to
just dip your eggs in and let them sit there
for three to four minutes.
Last yolk in.
Okay, that's set aside.
We'll use those later.
Egg whites into the bowl.
Pull that mixer towards you.
You're going to mix these until they're frothy
and I should have said earlier,
make sure your bowl is nice and clean.
You don't want any residual frosting,
that's not a good idea.
If you're extra concerned, you can wipe it down
with some vinegar, you'll always know it's squeaky clean.
We're going to mix this.
(mixer whirring)
And by the way, you can definitely use hand mixers
if you prefer yours to be sitting there for a few minutes.
So yes you can.
Wait, I just realized since we're doing things
the right way so you can have the best result,
let's sift our confectioner sugar.
It's not a must do, but it's just going to be
kind of annoying if there's any lumps,
even though they should get worked out,
but should is not my favorite word.
We want one pound or 450 grams of confectioner sugar.
Royal icing is one of those really intimidating things,
I have to tell you.
I was not a good cookie decorator for the longest time,
so I did a little bit of practice, a little bit of reading,
and it's actually much easier
if you just follow a few easy steps.
Back to mixing, this is all measured out.
And as you can see, I actually mixed it
for a minute already.
These eggs are nice and frothy,
so we're going to slowly add our powdered sugar in,
let it mix in.
If you see that there's like a wall of powdered sugar,
you can just scrape it down, but it should work itself out.
This is like an episode of I Love Lucy.
Gosh.
Last of my powder sugar is going in,
I'm just mixing it on low.
I'm going to give it one final just tamp down.
Once this is fully incorporated,
we're going to move it up to medium high
and beat for about three to four minutes
or until stiff, shiny peaks form.
I'm going to show you what that looks like though,
because they need to be stiff and shiny.
I see some sugar on the bowl, I need to tamp it down.
By the way, if you just dumped the sugar in,
you would lose a lot of volume so you don't want to
just dump it in.
With any kind of egg/sugar situation,
you always add the sugar in slowly.
Right now, I just want to check.
This is like, it's looking shiny.
Definitely not stiff, is it?
Nope, so we're going to keep going.
We're pumping air into this, we're volumizing it.
We're making it really like luscious in the texture
and it's going to be amazing.
While I'm at it, let's add that vanilla.
You could also use almond extract, lemon extract,
whatever you want.
Just one teaspoon or a little bit less is fine.
There we go.
Medium high, stiff and glossy.
We're going to check back in on this.
Checking back in.
Ah, look at this.
This is nice.
See, that is fairly stiff.
I like that.
You can see it's holding its shape, it's stiff and glossy.
That's what it looks like in the bowl.
This is going to be so great to do a consistency
that's for outlining.
When you make Royal icing, you have two types:
one's for outline, one's for flooding.
This is the outline batch.
We're going to add water but just a little bit
later on to make a flooding consistency,
and you'll see how that's different.
Many times the cookie does go like this,
and it's all going to just flow out and look messy,
so I'll show you how to do it the right way.
For now, we're going to grab some cookies,
which I baked ahead of time so they're nice and cool.
These are using my really easy cutout cookie recipe,
so you can click up here for that.
Beautiful straight lines, delicious too.
You want your cookies to be cool,
and now choose the colors that you want.
Today, I'm going to make some snowmen,
some Christmas trees, and some snowflakes.
So really I want white, green,
red, black, orange, and like,
I want like a lot of green,
a lot of white, a little red, a little black.
So I'm going to divide this into bowls and get to work.
We're always going to choose our color first,
then change the consistency.
And by the way, if you need to step away for any time,
like the kids are calling, you have to do something,
just cover this up.
You can use plastic or whatever,
and just make sure it's airtight.
Because if you don't, this will dry out,
you're not going to be happy.
First off, the easy one is your white outlining frosting.
So go ahead and we're icing.
We're going to add a small round tip,
it's like a number two, three, or four.
All of those will work.
In a pinch, you can definitely just
cut the tip off of a piping bag or even
like a regular plastic bag.
However, you're going to be happier
if you use around tip.
Just cleaner and less frustrating.
You don't need that much frosting for the outline,
so just grab oh, a quarter cup or less usually.
You can see that, look at that wonderful texture.
It's like marshmallow, it's very nice.
This is ready.
Perfect, so this stay in here just like that.
Now we need our flooding consistency white,
that's going to go into a bowl.
We're using more this time.
This is for all the snowmen and snowflakes,
that sort of thing.
For other colors, we're just gonna use one batch.
We're going to dye it first.
Once you're doing this, work with purpose
and don't walk away and do other stuff
because it dries out so quickly.
Look at these beaters or this beater, totally dry.
It's set up quickly, so we always cover it
and just don't walk away.
Just like the song says.
Some of the batches are going to be really small,
like for the orange noses for my snowmen
and some will be a little bit larger,
so just know what you're going to pipe
and kind of guesstimate it out.
And you can always leave some Royal icing in reserve.
Cover that back up, that's my emergency icing.
And now one note about coloring:
if you just run your mixer with a color on
and you want to make a big batch, don't do that.
Just use a spatula to mix it in
because this is not egg white, it's not sugar,
and you don't want to beat it up too much
and incorporate things that you don't want there.
I actually want to add in just a hint of black.
A tiny little drop.
Right now, we're going to mix this up
and just fold it in.
Using black just tones the colors down,
makes them a little bit more appealing to the eye,
but it's totally up to you.
And I'm using gel food colorings,
that's in the description box if you want to pick some up,
but they're much more concentrated,
which I love because you're not adding a ton of water in.
Now, pop in that piping tip, its a number three.
So to outline these trees,
I'm not going to need a ton.
That is ready to go.
And now I need to add a little bit of water.
So if I drizzle some of this icing over,
you can see it's totally just maintaining its shape.
It's not even losing back into itself.
See that?
That's not flooding consistency.
Flooding consistency will spread out and relax.
So let's grab a teaspoon.
I'm going to add in a quarter teaspoon of water,
just a little bit.
It's a stingy quarter teaspoon too.
Two really heavy drops of water.
And we're going to stir this in,
adding the remaining drop of water.
It seems silly, but this is what gets you.
This is one of the pain points of Royal icing
is finding that right consistency and just not
getting frustrated because if you have to add
more Royal icing back in, you change the color.
So you have to add more dye in, which just sucks.
You don't want to do that, so slow and steady
will win the race.
This is what you should be looking for.
Let the icing drizzle back in and it should
flow and disappear.
That is ready.
Now we can transfer this to our piping bag
and repeat that process for all the other colors.
If you're running out of piping tips,
this is a great time just to snip the tip off.
Or if you want to use a piping tip to have more control,
go ahead and use something like a six.
It's a larger circle, see?
See you.
When we get to the piping, I'm going to show you
some really important tips that have
saved my life in decorating cookies.
So just hang on for that.
Orange for the nose,
and now we can get to decorating.
So grab a comfy spot and let's go.
So when you decorate your cookie,
do not touch the piping tip to the cookie.
It should have an edge that just trails over.
Say where your line wants to go, follow the edge,
and this is your outline consistency.
And so it won't really droop or spread very much.
Okay, one outline's all done, now flood it right away.
You could let this set up for a second,
but you don't really need to do that.
This is where you really wanted that larger piping tip
so that it will let that icing come out.
But you do not want to overfill your cookie
because if there's a critical mass
of that Royal icing on top,
it's going to spill out over.
So use as much as you need, but don't go crazy.
And any little gaps you can use a toothpick or a pin
and just fill them in, I'll show you what that looks like.
That looks pretty good, we're going to set this aside,
but while that sets, you can start your snowman.
We're just going to outline it and fill it up again
with one color.
That star's a little tricky.
Oh my God, that was really bad.
So it's okay if it's really bad, you can do this.
You just start over, that's okay.
Things like this happen.
This is the nice part about the Royal icing.
There we go, that didn't happen.
What are you talking about?
Done.
I have to concentrate, I can't look at you.
I'm so sorry.
All right, now we're going to fill this up
and you can see, this is really flowy.
So we just want to get it out,
and if you have shaky hands like me,
you can use one hand to steady yourself.
Okay, this looks crazy, it looks bad.
But then what you can see, you might have seen this
on the videos is use a skewer, toothpick, or a pin,
and you can just remove any holes and even it out.
There we go.
You can also encourage the flooding icing
closer to the edge so you don't see that line.
Put these out of the way.
When they're wet, they're very endangered.
So just set them aside where you can't nudge them,
or your sleeve can hit them because that's where
you get all sad.
Stockings are nice and easy.
We're just going to give it a light fur top.
And then one thing that you can do here is
use some sanding sugar, sprinkle that on top.
So here you have a lot of beautiful texture and sparkle
and it'll hide any mistakes that happened.
Once your icing sets up,
you can add more colors next to it and not worry
about anything bleeding in.
The green icing set up, you can see it's nice
and matte now, you can also touch it.
So we're going to add some ornaments,
just some simple red dots will do amazing things.
So hover above and you'll see,
they really are super 3D and stand out.
That looks so cute.
If I dropped it, I would be so upset.
Look at how cute that is, oh my gosh.
I cannot wait to give these out in little gift boxes.
All right.
It didn't break.
My snowman set up, outline the hat,
and then we're going to fill it in.
Cute.
And now it's time for the detail work.
For this guy, I want him to have a face,
a scarf, and some buttons on his body.
I need three buttons.
We're going to pipe a little carrot nose too,
so just put that in there.
I did it.
And if you want, you can just like
finesse it a little bit more.
I'm going to use a needle for this one.
That looks cute, oh my gosh.
All right, the last thing is the scarf.
So he has a very short neck,
but we're not going to judge him for that.
He does want to stay warm.
Leaving a gap, you're going to see why.
We'll come back to it with the magic of editing.
This guy is so easy.
So we're going to flood and outline for my stocking.
Now that the rest of the scarf is set up,
I can just do a nice little overlapping bit here.
I love this Christmas tree,
but snowman has to be my favorite, look at that.
You can let me know in the comments who you love best.
This one's for me.
- This one's for me.
- Hey.
(laughing)
My snowman.
It tastes delicious and it makes a perfect gift.
If you liked this recipe, check out my holiday playlist.