Royal icing facts for kids
Lemon shortbread cookies with lemon royal icing
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| Type | Icing |
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| Main ingredients | Egg whites, powdered sugar, sometimes lemon or lime juice |
Royal icing is a special kind of icing that gets very hard and white when it dries. It's made from gently beaten egg whites, icing sugar (which is also called powdered sugar), and sometimes a little lemon or lime juice.
People use royal icing to decorate many yummy treats. You'll often see it on Christmas cakes, wedding cakes, gingerbread houses, and cookies. It can be spread smoothly or piped into cool, sharp peaks.
Sometimes, a little glycerine is added to the icing. This helps stop it from getting too hard. When putting royal icing on a cake, bakers often add a layer of marzipan first. This stops the icing from changing color.
Usually, to make royal icing, you mix about two egg whites with one teaspoon of lemon juice. You also add one teaspoon of glycerine and around one pound of sugar. The exact amount of sugar can change depending on what you're using the icing for.
Besides covering cakes, royal icing is also used to make amazing decorations. Think of pretty flowers or small figures that sit on top of a cake. The icing is piped into shapes and then left to dry on a special non-stick surface. Once they are hard, these decorations can be placed on many sweet foods. If you're making these decorations, you should not add glycerine.
Royal icing is also great for making snowy scenes on cakes. It can even be used as an edible glue, especially for building gingerbread houses!
The Story of Royal Icing
The first time the name "royal icing" was written down was in a cookbook from 1770. By the early 1800s, the name was well-known.
This type of icing became popular in the 1700s. Before that, icings were often like meringue and dried in an oven. A cook named Elizabeth Raffald is often given credit for adding the idea of putting a layer of marzipan under the icing in 1769.
Piping designs with royal icing became popular later, in the 1840s. This was thanks to new ideas from German chefs. Before piping, decorations were usually made from molded sugar paste.
There's a story that royal icing was named "royal" after Queen Victoria's wedding cake. However, this isn't true. The name was already being used for over 80 years before her wedding cake pictures were shared.
Gallery
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Black and white royal icing cookies
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Making royal icing
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Decorating gingerbread with royal icing
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Blue royal icing cookies
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Kransekage decorated with royal icing
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See also
In Spanish: Glaseado real para niños
