Two Spoonfuls: Royal Icing

This week in my Wilton Cake Decorating class, we started working with Royal Icing. What's Royal Icing, you ask? Well, it's a smooth hard-drying icing that's great for making flowers & other decorations. Once you've made something with it, you can keep it for about two years too. That's pretty cool.

Here's the recipe, compliments of the Wilton website:

Royal Icing

• 3 tablespoons Meringue Powder
• 4 cups (about 1 lb.) confectioners' sugar
• 6 tablespoons warm water

Makes: About 3 cups of icing.

Beat all ingredients until icing forms peaks (7-10 minutes at low speed with a heavy-duty mixer, 10-12 minutes at high speed with a hand-held mixer).

NOTE: Keep all utensils completely grease-free for proper icing consistency.

* For stiffer icing, use 1 tablespoon less water.

**When using large countertop mixer or for stiffer icing, use 1 tablespoon less water.

Pretty easy stuff. If you've got any cake decorating supplies at home, I highly recommend you try working with Royal Icing.

In my class this week, we worked on some violets, apple blossoms and violet leaves. Many flowers are made on what's called a flower nail. It's easy to turn as you pipe your icing onto the template.

Unfortunately, my icing was thinned down in class and it got a little too thin. Mine is the green on the right. I made all my colors very pale. I don't think that bright green is going to look good with my pale pink. hmmm, we'll see.

My lavender didn't work either so here are the royal icing violets I made with a classmate's purple icing. I might just whip up a new batch and try again. I definitely need some practice with this stuff.

Here are the apple blossoms. They turned out fine, but I'm not crazy about those yellow dots. I suppose once they're on a cake, the extra color will be nice.

We also made an icing called Color Flow Icing. It has a flowing texture and then dries hard so it's great for making icing shapes like this bird. I traced the bird on a piece of wax paper with white icing, then filled it in with the blue. It was dry by the end of class, but I waited two days to peel it off the paper. This would be great if you wanted to trace a character from a picture or something.

If you want to try making the Color-Flow Icing, here's a link to the recipe and some more information.

Know what else you can do with Color-Flow? Remember those candy dots that came on a strip of paper? I made my own with the leftover icing from my bluebirds. Pretty cool, huh? They look really shiny at first, but they dry with a matte finish, just like the classic dots. :D

I've really been enjoying my cake decorating classes, I can't wait for next week!
Now, I want to see what Jenn's got going in her kitchen...