Royal Icing Recipe

A royal icing recipe is used to make flowers and other decorations that you can prepare ahead. Royal icing frosting hardens quickly and can dry out fast so you want to cover your icing when you are not using it with a towel or wet paper towel. Once your icing decorations harden they can be placed on cakes before serving. You can also use royal icing to decorate cookies. This will give a smooth hard finish on the top.

Some recipes for royal icing call for egg whites that you don't cook. This works well for non-edible items like making sugar eggs or a gingerbread house you aren't going to eat.

However you don't want the royal icing with egg whites to touch your cake that you will be eating so the recipe below uses meringue powder. Wondering what meringue powder is?

3 Tablespoons meringue powder
4 Cups powdered sugar
6 Tablespoons warm water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Beat in mixer until forms stiff peaks which will be about 10 minutes. If you need to thin your icing add 1 teaspoon water.

Use this recipe for making decorations. Do not store royal icing or decorations made with royal icing in fridge. Store in a plastic container with an airtight lid at room temperature.

Royal Icing works well for the following decorating techniques:

• Color flow-use a paintbrush to fill in areas you are decorating. You'll see this mostly on cookies or decorations you will add to your cake.Photo courtesy of CakeGirl
  
• Flowers with petals such as drop flowers
• "Glue" to stick things to your cake.
• Lace, strings or side accents for your cake.