Holiday Recipes - How to Make Royal Icing

Hi, I am Nicole Ferrigno. I am here today with Lizzy Evelyn. We are with Paisley Fig Pastry and we are showing you how make holiday cookies today. Next, we will show you how to make something called Royal Icing.

The Royal icing is what we are going to need to finish our gingerbread snowflake cookies. We are going to start with two cups of confectioner sugar in our mixing bowl. Again, it s a very, very simple recipe. Two ingredients, we have confectioner sugar and into two cups confectioner sugar we are going to add one egg white.

Now, you are going to start with one egg white in your bowl and I want you just to drizzle it in slowly because you may not end up needing entire egg white. The consistency is going to vary from batch to batch on royal icing and sometimes it's important to end up with a really stiff icing and sometimes you want it to a little bit looser.

So, depending on what consistency you like you can add more or less of the egg whites, but really, royal icing ends up drying very hard which is what makes it great for decorating and it's almost like glue. Definitely, you want to scrape the bowl down so, you can get a good picture of what your consistency is like.

Now, once it all comes together and really is mixed, we can decide at that point if it needs a little bit more liquid. So, this is a little on the stiff side, we are going to go ahead and add extra egg white. So, we have determined that we need a little bit of extra liquid just so that the royal icing is a bit more liquid. What we are going to end up doing with this royal icing is putting it into a parchment cone and piping it. So, it has to be pipable. This is looking better and you really don t have to worry about over-mixing. So, you can certainly turn the speed up to get it to all come together and this is more what you are looking for. It's going to be really shiny and satiny and if you see how it's coming off that spatula there. It does sort of, fall in ribbons. So, you do want it be liquid enough so that it can be piped out of a bag. That looks great. So now, you have seen how to make the royal icing and when we come back we will show you how to finish our gingerbread snowflakes with the royal icing in a nice, pretty filigree pattern.