Royal Icing

I have been dying to try my hand at decorating cookies with royal icing. Does anyone have any tips? The whole flooding thing is so confusing. How do you stop it from going over the side?

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You have to start by piping a line around the outside edge of the entire cookie. Use a thicker consistency royal icing for the outline. Then when you flood the inside, it doesn’t run over the side.

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Practice on wax paper to get the hang of it and to make sure your icing is the right consistency. When using multiple colors, set a water glass with a damp paper towel in the bottom, one for each color. Keep your piping bags tip side down in these between colors. A water glass is also helpful to hold the bags when you are filling them. It’s been a while since I decorated cookies, this makes me want to bake a batch!

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As @endymion said, pipe an outline first. Leave it to dry before flooding so it doesn’t sag

I should probably admit that I don’t personally care for royal icing, and so I use glazes on my cookies now. :grin: And that I don’t worry too much about the glazes running over.

What is this glaze you speak of?

Softer than Royal Icing, and I think tastier. If you make it right and let it dry long enough, it crusts so that you can bag the cookies. Just google for recipes.

Here is a quick gif of someone flooding cookies with icing.

Instead of piping and flooding, I make my royal icing kind of medium-thick and then plop some in the middle of a cookie and use a spoon to push it almost all the way to the edge of the cookie. If you’ve ever used a spoon or ladle to push pizza sauce around on a pizza dough it’s a similar idea. That way you only need one icing consistency for the base layer.

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Yeah, I often use a silicone brush to apply the glaze with a similar technique. Quicker and not as fiddly as piping an outline. But I do sometimes have some spillover doing it this way. Not quite as pristine-looking as the piped-first method.