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Emma Chamberlain’s Blog: Royal Icing

Wednesday 25th May 2016

Hi everyone, I’m Emma Chamberlain from Renshaw Baking. Royal Icing is really on-trend at the moment and is one of my favourite products to use, so I thought I’d pull together some hints and tips for getting great results when using it.

Traditionally, royal icing was used to finish the covering of fruit cakes coated in marzipan. As trends have changed over the years so has our preferred taste in types of sponge, flavours and finished style of cake.

(Royal iced fruit cake by Domestic Gothess)

With more coatings available now such as buttercream and sugarpaste, the royal icing trend has lay dormant for a while. But now it’s great to see it making a comeback with the latest cookie trends and modern, quick techniques on coating a cake.

Some of my favourite royal icing tutorials to watch are the sugar cookies by SweetAmbs Cookies, especially her unicorn cookies. It’s a really popular trend at the minute to create bright and colourful cookies in fun and quirky designs, and it’s amazing to see just how creative you can get with royal icing – even on a little biscuit!

To make royal icing yourself, you need to beat egg white and icing sugar together until you either get soft or firm peak icing. As you can imagine this is a messy and time consuming process, so here at Renshaw we decided to give you a helping hand.

We have created a pot of White Royal Icing that is ready to use, so you can delve straight into creating your masterpiece.

Our White Royal Icing was launched in September so some of you might have come across it already, and we’d love to see what you’ve been making with it.

How to use Renshaw White Royal Icing

  • Open the pot and give it a good mix with a spoon which will make it smooth.
  • Only take what you need out of the pot, and be sure to replace the lid after to ensure it doesn’t dry out.

There are 3 main types of Royal icing consistency:

  • Full peak icing has a stiffer consistency and holds a peak when wobbled.
  • Soft peak icing holds a peak until it’s wobbled, then it falls over.
  • Flooding icing has been let down to a runny consistency so it becomes level after a few seconds of being drizzled onto itself.

Adjust the consistency according to how you are going to use it. The table below will help give you a rough guide.

Royal icing consistency

Adjustments

Best used for

Firm Can be used straight from the pot Spreading, coating, snow scenes, piping and adding food colouring
Soft Add approx. 2-3 drops of cooled boiled water per 100g Brush embroidery and stencilling
Runny Add approx. 6-8 drops of cooled boiled water per 100g Flooding biscuits and piped outlines


Top tip: If you need to thicken the icing you can do this by adding sieved icing sugar, 1 tsp at a time until you get the required consistency.

Video Tutorial: Brush Embroidery with Royal Icing

Take a look at my video below, I show you how to master the brush embroidery technique with royal icing for a delicate floral decoration for your biscuits and cakes.

Show us what you’ve been making with royal icing, join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter.