Royal Icing
This is a professional recipe for Royal Icing with Meringue Powder that uses lemon juice for a flavorful, less sweet royal icing. An easy recipe using only 4 ingredients. Perfect for decorating cookies, cakes, brownies and bars!
Servings: 40 Cookies
Ingredients
- 4 cups powdered sugar 1, 1 pound box
- 6 ½ tablespoons lemon juice juice from approximately 3 medium lemons
- ¼ cup meringue powder
- 1 tablespoon whole milk as needed
Instructions
- In a large bowl or in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, combine the meringue powder and lemon juice. Whisk until soft peaks form.
- Add all the powdered sugar and whisk to combine.
- If making more than one color, separate the icing into different bowls before adding gel food dye.
- Once you have created the desired color, test the consistency by dragging your spatula through the icing and then pulling it out. Watch how the icing falls off the spatula and back into the bowl. It is best to work with two consistencies for the same color: a flooding consistency and an outlining consistency. This will ensure you have perfect edges and details but the icing is the right thickness and also is easy to pipe and spread
- Outlining Consistency: The icing should cascade slowly off your spatula and remaining clearly visible on the surface for a few moments (about 5-6 seconds) before slowly disappearing.
- Flooding Consistency: The icing should cascade off your spatula and almost disappear instantly into the rest of the icing.
- I thin to the perfect outlining consistency, transfer some to a piping bag but I leave the majority in the bowl to be thinned further into flooding consistency. Transfer the flooding consistency to a separate piping bag.
- You can get to this stage in the recipe and then store the colored icing in bags up to a week. If they separate, simply shake the icing in the bag to get it to come together.
Notes
Yield – Enough to ice approximately 40, 3-inch cookies. If making more than 3 colors, I recommend making a double batch to ice the same number of cookies. It is difficult to perfectly anticipate how much of each color in each consistency you will need.
Presentation – Let it set at least 30 minutes before adding layers of detail on top of a royal icing base.
Variations – Substitute orange juice or water for the lemon juice. Add flavorings like clear vanilla extract or almond extract. You can also use egg white powder in place of the meringue powder or substitute 3 egg whites from large eggs (90g) for both the powder and lemon juice.
Storage – Allow cookies to dry 4 hours before wrapping and 24 hours before stacking.
Presentation – Let it set at least 30 minutes before adding layers of detail on top of a royal icing base.
Variations – Substitute orange juice or water for the lemon juice. Add flavorings like clear vanilla extract or almond extract. You can also use egg white powder in place of the meringue powder or substitute 3 egg whites from large eggs (90g) for both the powder and lemon juice.
Storage – Allow cookies to dry 4 hours before wrapping and 24 hours before stacking.
Nutrition
Calories: 47kcal | Carbohydrates: 12g | Protein: 0.02g | Fat: 0.02g | Saturated Fat: 0.01g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 0.001g | Monounsaturated Fat: 0.003g | Cholesterol: 0.04mg | Sodium: 0.4mg | Potassium: 3mg | Fiber: 0.01g | Sugar: 12g | Vitamin A: 1IU | Vitamin C: 1mg | Calcium: 1mg | Iron: 0.01mg