Tag: Royal Icing Tutorials

Royal Icing: Test for Royal Icing Consistency by Using Tiny Piping Cones

If you are following the steps in my Royal Icing tutorial series, this article relates to some of the items I listed in “Royal Icing: Assemble Supplies.

Because you only need a few tablespoons of Royal Icing at a time to test its consistency, use small piping cones (“bags”). Unfortunately, there are no ready-made tiny cones available to buy. Fortunately, making your own small cones is fairly easy.

Making and Using Very Small Piping Cones

The least expensive hand-made piping cones are made out of parchment paper.  Follow any of the tutorials below to learn how to construct one:

{:} Google search on “How to Make Parchment Piping Cones.”

{:} Video of Julia Usher on “How to Make Parchment Piping Cones.”

{:} Print article by Julia Usher on “How to Make Parchment Piping Cones.”

{:} How to Make a Mini Piping Bag

After learning how to make a standard sized cone, simply reduce the size of your  triangle. I use pre-made parchment triangles which you can find on Amizon by searching on the phrase, “Parchment Triangles for Baking.” Cut the standard triangle in half, fold, and secure the long edge with tape.

Use office binder clips to secure the top after the mini-cone is filled with icing, or tape it. Because the cone can be so small, it may be better to firmly secure the top than to roll it over like you would with a bigger cone to avoid frosting spurting out.

Note that you can also attach a metal piping tip to a paper cone, but to make a tight seal, you must tape the tip to the paper, which is not very efficient.

You can also make small bags out of standard disposable plastic pastry bags simply by cutting them down to size. The advantage to using a disposable plastic pastry bag is you can easily attach a tip to it via a coupler. Seal the top of the small bag with a snack bag clip.

If you don’t use a piping tip, clip the tip of the bag to make a small hole.

Another way to create a tiny cone is by using a sandwich or half-quart plastic bag. Remove the top seal, then cut the remaining portion in half, bottom to top. Fill a remaining section with icing, seal with a snack bag or binder clip, snip the tip, and squeeze.  Be careful that you do not squeeze so strongly that the icing comes out of the top!

The cookies below were decorated at a cookie frosting party with tiny parchment piping bags. You might find that tiny piping bags work better than big ones when you want to make a lot of designs from a wide assortment of colors. They are commonly used, in fact, for very delicate work.

Article Series

For Royal Icing recipes, CLICK HERE

For a list of all articles in this series, CLICK HERE

 

Questions? Comments? Additions? Corrections? Write to Karen Little at karen@Littleviews.com

 


Written for Littleviews-Crafts.com by Karen Little, publisher. All rights reserved, but feel free to re-publish this article after contacting Karen so she knows where to find it.

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Royal Icing Experiments

This past August, I set up my Royal Icing lab to test Royal Icing consistencies to show you how to have guaranteed results every time (because, frankly, mine had been inconsistent).

Unfortunately, August set a record in New Jersey for the hottest summer on record and when the temperature cooled, the humidity went up. Despite the humidity, the now 70-degree weather felt great, so while conducting my tests, I threw open my windows, turned off the air conditioner, and enjoyed the natural warmth of late summer.

What I didn’t realize at that time was that the humidity hit 100%. The atmosphere became so moist in our house, that all our wood floors buckled and my sheets of experiments became soggy and unable to hold a shape. It took almost two months before our floors flattened.

The soggy green Royal Icing below was from one of my experiments. It started out as hard! When I got up the next day after it had hardened, our apartment was filled with smoke, which turned out to be fog. Unfortunately, all my samples from the previous day turned into textures similar to raw eggs.

Discovery

I initiated this project to find out for myself why some Royal Icing worked, while others didn’t, because I have not been uniformly successful over the year I’ve been involved making Royal Icing.

My primary online tutorial instructor was Stephanie Kappel of Better Basics for Exceptional Cookies with Stephanie Kappel, who provided a crispy recipe with her course. Several batches of butter cookies later, however, I found a recipe by Karen Anderson on Julia Usher’s website that I liked better. By adding corn syrup to the basic recipe, Karen’s version made slightly soft, very glossy coating that was almost foolproof.


Crisper frosting in my own novice hands formed bubbles, dents, and cave-ins, like you see below.

As I became more skilled, subsequent trials with crisp Royal Icing looked great after applying it, but awful the next day.

Most commonly, my crispy dots and piped lines broke. I had a difficult time making rounded dots, as you can see below, although online trainers suggested that I was having consistency issues. By myself, even after copious research and trials, I couldn’t resolve them.

I was so frustrated that I went online asking for help. Friends from Julia Usher’s Facebook Group jumped in right away and told me that I needed to quickly dry my cookies under a fan to avoid cave-ins, which helped a lot, but I still had a problem with broken bubbles.

After switching to  Karen Anderson’s recipe, I rarely had trouble again, but there was a downside to using more flexible frosting. I was not able to produce thin, crisp piping that I learned I could achieve from Stephanie’s Craftsy tutorial.

One Size Does Not Fit All

You might fall in love with a cookie design or designer, but I learned that if you don’t use her or his same recipe, you might fail.

Shaking a freshly frosted cookie to make bubbles rise to the surface so you can pop them works with crisp frosting, but not soft. If you rely on shaking soft frosting, you’ll produce ripples in what should be a smooth surface and ruin your cookies.

I suspect, too, that although soft frosting is flexible, it may not have the proper texture for wet-on-wet techniques because it can introduce rippling that is similar to what happens when shaken. That said, I did successfully produce a few, but to do so, I had to work quickly.

With soft frosting, however, I can quickly show new people how to decorate cookies without flaws. The photo below, for example, shows my sister-in-law’s first try! Everything she did looked beautiful as did those of her guests who attended the frosting party I led. Not a cracked bubble or sunk surface in the several dozen cookies frosted that day.

Toolbox Talk

Under Julie Usher’s blog area, Toolbox TalkLiesbet Schietecatte examined the behavior of Royal Icing in her article, Corn Syrup in Royal Icing. This scholarly article covers information on corn syrup, along with the discovery that most well-known cookie artists do not use it. (In my opinion, it does not have as long of bakery-shelf life as the crispy version, but that is OK for home bakers.)

Liesbet’s article continues with an overview of products that can be used in Royal Icing (corn syrup, glucose, and glycerin), in addition to the standard (called plain). From there, Liesbet runs experiments and documents results of different Royal Icing mixtures, including plain.

Her pictures tell the story, with fan-dried, corn-syrup based frosting looking the best on cookies that feature a single layer of flooded icing.

Littleviews Talk

I am following Liesbet’s Royal Icing scholarship by simultaneously comparing batches of crispy and soft icing to seeing and feeling the results of:

  • Texture after initial mixing
  • Resting in a refrigerator 24 hours before use
  • Flooding behavior
  • Making dots
  • Piping thick and thin lines
  • Outlining that includes flooding in small areas
  • Wet-on-wet designing
  • Making Royal Icing Transfers

Under all circumstances, I’ll dry the frosting under a fan as air drying can ask for disaster.

The articles will appear weekly until I’ve exhausted the experiments, then I’ll move on to Royal Icing stenciling.

Related Links

Article Series

For Royal Icing recipes, CLICK HERE

For a list of all articles in this series, CLICK HERE

Questions? Comments? Additions? Corrections? Write to Karen Little at karen@Littleviews.com

 


Written for Littleviews-Crafts.com by Karen Little, publisher. All rights reserved, but feel free to re-publish this article after contacting Karen so she knows where to find it.

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Royal Icing: High Humidity and Royal Icing Consistency Testing

The most optimum environment in which to test Royal Icing consistency is one that falls between 40 and 60 percent humidity. A low humidity will force you to add more water to your mixture. In high humidity, however, water vapor contained in the atmosphere is constantly being added to your mixture, making the mixture difficult to adjust even if you add more powdered sugar to sop it up.

Ideally, home-baked sugar cookies are crisp and have a snap to them. As humidity increases, those cookies begin to taste moist and become flexible. Bread, cake, and pie also quickly degrade in high humidity, with bread turning moldy if not stored in a refrigerator.

Problems Testing Royal Icing in a Very Humid Atmosphere

It takes skill to decorate Royal Icing sugar cookies and as a home baker, you do not want your entire batch ruined due to high humidity. Whether practicing on plastic sheets or trying to make a batch for family and friends, high humidity can make Royal Icing “melt” and sugar cookies soggy.

The example on the left side of the photo above is a closeup of a perfectly decorated cookie which was created and served in a normal humidity.

On the right is the result of a consistency test that was created in an air-conditioned atmosphere. When I went to bed, I turned off our air conditioner, and opened windows, not thinking about how the Royal Icing would be affected. The humidity outside was a warm, 100% and when I work up, I found that the frosting itself flowed into a moist, sticky mess. Don’t let this happen to you!

The last thing you want to do is see all your painstaking work melt away, so take care to regulate the humidity in your baking environment and make sure to refrigerate all your hard work in air-tight containers.

Household Humidity

Before attempting to test and ultimately use Royal Icing, make sure that the humidity in your home is between 40 and 60%. Check one or more rooms using inexpensive Room Humidity Monitors. The outside humidity is not as important if your home is sealed and you run an air conditioner.

Use inexpensive temperature and humidity monitors to help you gauge your environment. Indoor humidity is variable from zone to zone, especially when someone is showering in one room and someone else is boiling soup in another. Aim for an even humidity throughout your environment on the day or days you get into sugar cookie baking and decorating.

You can lower the humidity in your baking area by running a dehumidifier or air conditioner. If you can’t easily install a whole-home dehumidifier, perhaps a room-sized unit or two will do. The Pure Enrichment Premium Dehumidifier, for example, is designed for very small spaces and might be all you need.

But If You Can’t Lower Your Humidity . . .

If you cannot control the humidity in your baking area at a normal level, postpone baking sugar cookies and working with Royal Icing. The key to a good taste in your final product is a crisp bite and pretty appearance which is difficult to achieved when humidity is very high.

Storing Sugar Cookies Frosted with Royal Icing

Refrigerate sugar cookies in an air-tight container before and after being frosted.

If you plan on serving them as a centerpiece, consider the display atmosphere. Deliver them in an air-tight container layered with parchment paper. Let them sit out for a short-but-reasonable period. When dessert time is over, return them to the container (if any are left, of course).

If you must serve your beautiful creations in a humid area (like at a summer picnic by a lake), be as careful with them as you would with egg salad. Keep them in a cool, air-tight container until service time, then put them away again shortly thereafter.

Cookies frosted with Royal Icing are small works of art, so protect the looks and tastes of your creations as much as possible and do not waste time fighting with the atmosphere because high humidity will probably win.

Article Series

For Royal Icing recipes, CLICK HERE

For a list of all articles in this series, CLICK HERE

Questions? Comments? Additions? Corrections? Write to Karen Little at karen@Littleviews.com

 


Written for Littleviews-Crafts.com by Karen Little, publisher. All rights reserved, but feel free to re-publish this article after contacting Karen so she knows where to find it.

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Royal Icing: What to Avoid

It might take several days before you assemble your Royal Icing creation supplies, as discussed in “Royal Icing: Assemble Supplies” on this website, so take the time to review more details about the process. It  is important for the home baker to know what can go wrong.

Nothing is more disappointing than to spend an afternoon creating a batch of beautifully decorated sugar cookies only discover the next morning that all have been ruined over night.

Most, if not all, ruined cookies are the result of improperly mixed Royal Icing consistencies. Problems include cracks, dimples, color bleeding, and dried frosting flakes marring freshly decorated surfaces. Consider these examples:

Colors can bleed into each other over drying time and are usually seen the next day after you’ve congratulated yourself for having created the perfect batch.

Bubbles and frosting collapses ruin what you thought were cute creations.

 

Piped lines are uneven and flooded areas do not stay within a boundary, which really destroy what you wanted to be a unique “hand crafted” look.

Flakes of dried icing on smooth surfaces mar cookies because you didn’t understand how time is required by constantly cleaning your hands, piping bags, and work surfaces while decorating.

Frosting surfaces have ripples because you didn’t understand what happens when you take too long to manipulate wet icing.

Stained hands, fingernails, and even preparation surfaces also occur when you don’t “clean, clean, clean” during the preparation process. Finger stains can last for more than 24 hours!

The above pictures are from my own initial cookies. Some of my biggest mistakes resulted from poor planning, a messy work surface, and not enough places to put my frosted cookies to dry. Hopefully, this series of tutorial lessons will help you avoid the worst cases and provide you with the skills to create your best!

And Your Objective?

Your objective is to make your Royal Icing smooth, your piping perfect, and your work area tidy.

 

Article Series

For Royal Icing recipes, CLICK HERE

To see a list of all articles in this series, CLICK HERE

Questions? Comments? Additions? Corrections? Write to Karen Little at karen@Littleviews.com

 


Written for Littleviews-Crafts.com by Karen Little, publisher. All rights reserved, but feel free to re-publish this article after contacting Karen so she knows where to find it.

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