Simple Royal Icing for Halloween Sugar Cookies

Simple Royal Icing Recipe:
3 cups (366g) powdered sugar
1/8 tsp. (1g) salt
1/2 tsp (2g) vanilla extract
2 tbsp. (20g) fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 tbsp. (12g) meringue powder or 3 tbsp. fresh pasteurized egg whites
8-12 tbsp. water

Directions:
Add salt, meringue powder or egg whites, vanilla extract and lemon juice to powdered sugar. Using a whisk, combine these ingredients. Begin adding water 2-3 tablespoons at a time until your icing is smooth. The consistency has to be thick enough to hold a ribbon for 1 – 2 seconds. What this means is when you lift the icing up and let it drip you should be able to go back and forth and create a ribbon in the icing which holds its shape for 1-2 seconds before dissolving into the icing. If your icing is too thick, add a little water at a time. If it is too thin, you can fix it by adding a little but of powdered sugar at at time until you reach the right consistency.

I use gel food color to dye the royal icing. This recipe will make enough icing to decorate 20 medium sized sugar cookies. For the Halloween cookies I split the royal icing up into 4 colors (black, orange, purple, and white).

The tools I use to decorate sugar cookies are piping bags (12 inch), a variety of sprinkles, paper cups to hold the sprinkles, a scribe tool to spread the icing around on the cookie and edible pens. I also like to use luster dust to add shimmer and I use a clean unused toothbrush to apply the dust to the cookies.

Sugar cookies are so much fun and versatile. I hope you give this royal icing a try soon!

More about this recipe…

Sugar cookies are always fun to make any time of year but for some reason Halloween is always my favorite. I absolutely love fall and Halloween is probably my second favorite holiday because it kicks off the holiday season and its just so much fun. Each year I plan my costume months in advance and put so much effort into making it on my own. I enjoy baking fun delicious treats to share with coworkers and friends, my favorite of all are sugar cookies. There are a lot of royal icing recipes out there and I’ll be honest, I have tried many that I did not care for. The icing is usually too sweet or has absolutely no flavor other than sugar. For this recipe I use fresh lemon juice and vanilla extract. I have also added cinnamon and other spices to royal icing change the flavor. You could use orange juice or even apple juice if you wanted to switch up the flavor. I am actually considering making a pumpkin spiced royal icing for Thanksgiving sugar cookies. You can use this icing on any sugar cookie whether home made or store bought. The important thing is allowing your cookies to cool completely before icing them. 

I always like to start with a border around the edge, this will keep the cookies looking clean. I start by adding a border to all of my cookies, by the time I am done with the last border, the first cookie I started on is dry enough to move on. 

The next step is to “flood” the cookie with the royal icing, you may need to cut the hole of your icing bag a tad more to allow more icing to flow. You carefully fill the inside of the cookie with enough icing that when spread covers the entire cookie. Then using a scribe tool or tooth pick you move the icing around the cookie to spread it to the edge of the border, filling the cookie with an even layer of icing. 

You can add sprinkles at this stage or allow the cookies to set a few minutes and pipe a design etc. 

The sky is the limit with how creative you can be with your sugar cookies. I hope you enjoyed this recipe! Happy Halloween!