Tried and True Sugar Cookie Icing Recipes!

• Royal Icing |
• Simple Shiny Sugar Cookie Icing

There are lots of choices for sugar cookie icing recipes out there. If you prefer icing that hardens on cookies giving them a professional look, then I have two suggestions.

The first is royal icing - the white, smooth, hard drying icing most often associated with decorating gingerbread men, and making and decorating gingerbread houses.

Depending on its consistency, royal icing can be used as the “cement” to fasten gingerbread houses together. Thinner versions of royal icing are perfect for piping and flooding sugar cookies. It hardens to a matte finish and can be tinted with food coloring to create a rainbow of colored icing for your sugar cookies.

Traditional royal icing is made with raw egg whites. I prefer the safe and easy option – royal icing made with meringue powder, a concoction of dried egg whites, sugar, vegetable gum, and cream of tartar available at specialty food stores and places with cake decorating supplies.

The second suggestion is a sugar cookie-icing recipe made from a combination of confectioner’s sugar, milk, and light corn syrup that creates a beautifully shiny smooth finish. Its consistency can be adjusted quite easily and color modified with food coloring.

Many factors can affect your icing consistency, such as humidity, temperature, ingredients and equipment. You may need to try using different icing consistencies when decorating to determine what works for you. You will want it a little thicker for piping and outlining and a bit thinner for filling in/flooding.

Divide your icing into separate bowls, and add food colorings to each to create desired colors. Now comes the creative part. You can pipe icing onto your cookies, paint icing on them with a brush, spread icing with the back of a spoon, squeeze icing onto them from a squeeze bottle, or dip the cookies into icing. Experiment to see what works best for you.

Icing Recipe Tips:

• These icings dry out quickly, so keep them covered with a wet kitchen towel at all times.
• I prefer gel food colorings because they are easier to work with, less messy, and provide more brilliant colors. You can find gel food colorings in the cake decorating area of crafts stores, party stores, online, and I even noticed Betty Crocker food coloring gels at my grocery store.

You Might Need:

Ateco 12-Color Food Coloring Kit - Let your cookie decorating abilities shine with this food coloring kit from Ateco. The easy to work with gel pastes provide brilliant colors!