Cookie Decorating with Royal Icing

Decorating Christmas cookies was a fun weekend project with friends, especially when said friends had the cookies already baked and cooled, all ready to add happy details. We used one basic approach to cover each cookie: rather than dunk the cookie into the icing, we piped icing around the border, then "flooded" in thinner icing to achieve the desired coverage. Its a little more work, but its the best way to make detailed, multi-colored surfaces on flat cookies.



Some royal icing tidbits:

- The recipe we used was 1 C powdered sugar + 2 T milk to start, adding milk just until the icing is the consistency of spackle. This is called stiff consistency, and to test the stiffness, start piping a dot and lift the bag up away from the surface, creating a small point (like a Hershey's kiss). If the point stands for 1 minute, the consistency will allow you to pipe any line, border, flower, figure, etc without falling or "melting".

- Cake decorators achieve vibrant colored icing using gels and powders, which are concentrated doses of color. Use gel-based icing color rather than liquid food color to avoid unintentionally thinning the consistency.

- Once you've piped the outlines, transfer icing from the bag into a bowl and add milk until the icing is smooth and flowy (but not runny). Icing is now ready to be piped (a small snip off the piping bag is all you need) inside each outlined shape.

- After the thinned icing has soft set, you can add more stiff consistency details atop the cookies. We used dots and stars, but there are as many options as your imagination allows. At this stage, it becomes no different than piping decorations onto a cake.

- Because the thinned icing doesn't dry hard, these cookies stay softer than the hard, crunchy, air-dried decorations many cake decorators use. The small amount of milk in the recipe is preserved by the large quantity of powdered sugar, making them safe to leave at room temperature.