This is the 2nd of my 3 part series on how to make a gingerbread house. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to follow up on the series!
To continue on in the gingerbread house journey, I decided that I wanted to make my own royal icing.
I had never done it before, but royal icing seemed like the best choice for assembling a gingerbread house.
I made a trip to Sur la Table and picked up some cookie cutters, meringue powder, food coloring (in gel form), decorating tips, 1 nice pastry bag, and a box of plastic decorating bags.
When I was in high school I worked at a cookie store in the mall called Blondie’s.
Blondie’s was the first place I learned how to make gourmet cookies, decorate cookies/cookie cakes using pastry bags and tips plus all sorts of colored sugars and sprinkles. It was so fun!
But surprisingly we never used royal icing to decorate our cookies. All we had was this super thick (and delicious!!) buttercream. I was a bit nervous to try the new frosting, but it was well worth the effort.
Royal icing is simply a very hard white icing, made from softly beaten egg whites and powdered sugar.
In my case, I used a nifty little ingredient called meringue powder. I had never used it before, but I have been hearing about it on other blogs. So I went with this method.
I also like that you could safely eat the icing with out running the risk of consuming raw eggs.
This recipe is easy to adjust if you need your icing to be more, or less fluid. They meringue powder came with a list of other recipes for different frostings that I can’t wait to try!
