July 17, 2009

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...

5 comments:

Jenn Maruska said...

Beautiful! (Looks like fun to do, too!)

LeeAnn said...

Is it too much to ask for Color Flow Icing Gadget Monkey's? :P

Mrs.Kwitty said...

Had to pop in and see how your cake deco classes are coming along--you are doing great!!! Looove that bird!
Smiles, Karen

Heather said...

OMG....candy dots!! Love them! Your flowers look good.

Hena Tayeb said...

great work. the bird looks great. my mom took one of these class when we were young and then she used her talents to make the birthday cakes of everyone in our family.