Holiday Recipes - How to Make Royal Icing

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Nichole Ferrigno
How to make holiday cookies, Paisley Fig Pastry
www.paisleyfig.com  
 

Nichole attended L'Academie de Cuisine in Gathersburg, Maryland, where she earned a degree in Pastry Arts. She has nine years of experience as a pastry chef, at a variety of restaurants in and outside of Washington, D.C. Nichole also teaches baking classes at L'Academie de Cuisine as well as kid's cooking classes for Tiny Chefs.

Holiday Recipes - How to Make Royal Icing

 

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Holiday Recipes - How to Make Royal Icing

Ingredients

1 stick of unsalted softened butter
1/2 cup of packed dark brown sugar
1 large egg
1/2 cup of dark Black Strap molasses
3 cups of all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
1/4 teaspoon of baking powder
2 teaspoons of ginger
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon of clove
1/2 teaspoon of black pepper
3/4 teaspoon of salt
2 cups confectioner sugar
1 egg white

Instructions

1. Mix the butter and the brown sugar together until the mixture is fluffy. Add the egg and turn the speed up to better incorporate the egg. Then add the molasses and mix for a minute or two.


2. Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, ginger, cinnamon, clove, black pepper and salt. Mix on low speed.


3. Pack the gingerbread dough into a sheet of plastic wrap and press it into a flat disk. Chill it in the fridge for an hour.


4. To make the frosting, combine the confectioner sugar and the egg white. Mix them thoroughly.


5. Roll the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Using a cookie cutter, cut the cookies out of the dough and place them on a cookie sheet.


6. Preheat the oven to 150 degrees and bake the gingerbread cookies for 12 minutes. Remove the cookies, allow them to cool and then decorate them with the frosting.

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Transcripts

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.

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