Senior Design Seminar: Royal Icing

First attempt

I went into this thinking, how hard could this be? Famous last words.

First, I went to the store and bought some pre-made cookie dough. As I was trying to focus on decorating the cookies, I didn’t want to waste any time making the cookies from scratch.

Once I got home, I started by baking the cookies. When those were done, I pulled up a royal icing recipe I found on Google. It called for 4 cups of confectioners' sugar, 3 cups of meringue powder, and 10 tablespoons of water. I quickly realized I wasn't going to need that big of a batch of frosting and decided to cut the measurements in half to make a smaller amount. This was my first mistake.

As I was making my first batch of frosting, I started to notice it was really dry and hard to combine. So, I went to YouTube to find a video as a quick solution. I was panicking because royal icing dries fast, but I didn’t know how fast, so I wasn’t sure how much time I would have to find a solution to my first problem. Out of panic, I added ¾ cup of water to the dry batch. For reference, the video I was watching only called for ¼ cup of water, so ¾ cup was way too much.

Now, panicking for the opposite reason, I was at a loss and didn’t know what to do. I debated whether to throw the whole thing away and start from scratch or to try to save what I had as a desperate way to prevent wasting so many ingredients. I decided to try and save it by adding another cup of confectioners' sugar. Now I was way off from both recipes I was looking at, so I decided to eyeball it. I knew I was looking for a shiny but stiff consistency that kind of looked like marshmallow, creating a peak that could stand on its own but had a little bit of a droop to it.

Once I thought I had this consistency, I quickly filled a piping bag and ran over to the cookies to outline one. The frosting was too stiff; I could barely get it to come out of the piping bag. So, I added more water to the mixing bowl and threw out the first bag full. Once I thought I had my second attempt down, I bagged it and made the leftover frosting thinner so I could flood the cookies. My second attempt was too soft; the lines were thicker and wouldn’t hold their shape. However, it was too late. I had already made the rest of the batch thinner for flooding and would have basically been starting all over again.

I didn’t want to waste any more of my ingredients on this disaster of a batch, so I did the best I could to decorate the cookies with what I had.

Here's what I learned for next time.

Find one recipe and follow it.

Sift the powdered sugar.
It's in the recipe for a reason! I learned the hard way that it helps make your lines smoother.

Practice on bigger cookies.
I can't create pretty designs if I don’t have the space!

Research.
Watch multiple videos to get an understanding of what I'm looking for and to learn how to combine the thicker and thinner frostings on the cookie.

Patience is key.
While frosting the cookies, it's better to take your time and guide the frosting into the shape you're trying to make rather than rush through it.

Mixing frosting and finding the right consistency takes time, but it saves time and ingredients in the long run.