How To Decorate Cookies With Royal Icing

Hi, I'm Bridget Edwards, cookbook author and creator of the blog, Bake at 350. I'm here today with Imperial Sugar and Dixie Crystals to show you how to decorate cookies using royal icing. I'm using Imperial Sugar's royal icing recipe, which starts with sifting together four cups of powdered sugar with three tablespoons of dried egg whites. To this, we'll add two teaspoons of lemon juice, and a half cup of warm water. Use the paddle attachment on your electric mixer, and start on low. Once the sugar is incorporated into the liquid, increase the speed up to medium, and set your timer for about five minutes. For tinting royal icing, you'll want to use a gel paste food coloring. Gel paste are wonderful to use with royal icing. They won't thin out your icing like a liquid food coloring would, and they also give you nice, rich, vibrant shades. So all you do is squeeze a little bit into your icing, and just give it a stir. Once you have your desired shade, you'll want to go ahead and just press a piece of plastic wrap right down on top of your icing. This will keep your royal icing from crusting. Now let's get decorating. Let's start with outlining. Outlining is used as a guide for filling in cookies, and it's also used for piping decorative details. Hold your icing bag above the cookie at a slight angle, and let the icing fall onto the cookie. When you reach the end, gently just press down your icing tip while you stop squeezing. Now we're going to prepare our icing for flooding, and flooding is just a fancy term for thinning your icing with water to fill in your outlines. So we just start by adding water little by little. You always want to start with a small amount of water. It's much easier to add water than it is to take it away. And just stir it. You're looking for your icing to be about the consistency of glue. When you have the right consistency, you'll drop your icing back onto itself, and when it disappears in a count of 1,001, 1,002, you're good to go. To flood your cookies, simply use your thin icing and squeeze onto your cookie. Use a generous amount of icing, but don't worry about covering every little bit. It will spread. Once you've covered the cookies with the flood icing, use a toothpick to guide the icing into all the empty spaces and into the corners. To add decorative details like dots, just take a contrasting color of flood icing and drop dots onto the wet icing. You'll want to give the base color a minute or two to set before adding the dots on top. Another easy decorative detail is to turn those dots into hearts, and all you need is a toothpick to do this. So just drop your dots onto your cookie, and then take a toothpick and drag that toothpick through the center of each dot, creating hearts. Another popular design that you can make while using the wet-on-wet technique is to create lines and marbling. So you want to take contrasting color icing and for the lines, just draw lines across your icing. It's as easy as that. Take a toothpick and drag them through your lines, going back and forth. It's a really simple way to make a cookie look extra fancy. You can use different tips to add pretty decorative details to your cookies. You'll want to use piping consistency icing, and I'm using a star tip to make a decorative border. And you'll just use a pulsing motion going along all of the edges of your cookie for a really simple but really pretty detail. Now we'll use a leaf tip to add leaves to our strawberry cookies. And you just squeeze and then release the pressure to make a leaf. Squeeze at the bottom and then release the pressure. You want to let these cookies dry uncovered for six to eight hours or overnight. Don't worry, they won't go stale.