Side Quest to the Royal Icing Castle

Finally, here is part two in my sugar cookie adventure. Nine out of ten times when you make sugar cookies, you are going to want to decorate them. Sometimes it’s with a simple decorators icing (or rose paste to those in the industry), or for great taste you go for full on buttercream. The trend lately has been royal icing because it has been easiest to do fine detail work and go all out in the creativity department. It also helps that in its simplest form it can be two ingredients, egg whites and powdered sugar. Those two ingredients are perfect for flooding a cookie, but not always the best when trying to pipe lines of detail. That's when you bump it up and reach for your meringue powder. When meringue powder is involved, you end up with a fluffy cloud of icing. It makes it easier to do things, like flowers and just piping all together.. And you can still water it down to use for flood the whole cookie as well. In my own personal opinion though, it has a bit of a bitter after taste, but your cookies will look amazing.

So after decorating most of my cookies for Easter in traditional fashion, I left a few to try with two royal icing recipes that did not involve egg whites. First one, I got off the internet at http://www.food.com/recipe/vegan-eggless-royal-icing-404594, it used only powdered sugar, water (or a non dairy milk, like rice, almond or soy), light corn syrup and extract (they say almond but I used vanilla). When making it I ended up doing half the water and just a bit more powdered sugar than suggested. Even with those slight alterations, it was still a little runny. This recipe Is good to use if you are flooding and blending colors but was rather hard to get stiff enough to pipe with. After sitting out overnight, it set up like a rock and made a good solid cookie.

The next recipe I used, I got from a vegan cookbook that was all on cakes and icings. The book is called Pure Artistry: Extraordinary Vegan and Gluten-Free Cakes by Emily Lael Aumiller, her recipe of course used powdered sugar and water but also uses xanthan gum instead of corn syrup as the thickening agent. The xanthan gum also made it less sweet than the other one. That is the thing when it comes to royal icing, it is a sugar rush like no other. But I did notice that after sitting all night it was a little soft, did not set up solid like normal royal icing does. Again it was the same situation as the first one, where it was great for flooding but not for fine detail. It was slightly thicker than the last one, so it was easier to flood with smaller chance of it possibly running off the cookie.

Out of the two, taste wise, I preferred the xanthan gum icing because it didn’t feel like the sugar content was rotting my teeth on the spot. Most others that tried it could care less either way. So my conclusion is these icing are perfect for putting a base down or doing something like feathering but not for fine piping work. But this was only two recipes of hundreds that are out there. I plan to continue my research and hopefully locate a vegan royal icing that is fluffy but stiff enough to work with.

Author’s Note: I thank all of you that have been loyal readers so far. There would be more pictures in this normal but my low quality camera couldn't really capture the slight differences in the cookies, so this is all I have. In several months I hope to build my blog up so that eventually there will be a posting every week and maybe doing some videos, but getting a camera to take better quality pictures is first on the list. Feedback is always welcome, I really enjoy me experiments and would love to try something that my readers suggest.