In the very serious world of sugar cookies, the biggest debate that causes fist fights and prison style shiv brawls is whether to use royal icing or glaze. Everyone has their personal preference and they will fight it to the death!!!

Fine, fine. Cookie enthusiasts are actually as sweet and sugary as you would expect them to be. For real though, there are some things to consider when making this choice. The entire reason I started my journey to make sugar cookies from scratch was because every time I bought a beautiful looking sugar cookie it inevitably tasted like flavored cardboard. I think royal icing may be to blame. I LOVE sugar cookies and that first bite was always such a disappointment! (cue sad Charlie Brown music a la Arrested Development.)  I would say the majority of cookie artists use royal icing because it offers a lot more design freedom to make intricate designs, details, and textures because it doesn’t spread as much as glaze. Seriously, if you’ve never checked out the master works of Sweet Sugarbelle or SweetAmbs prepare to spend hours gawking at their incredible royal icing creations. Maybe some of these other cookiers have managed to create a great tasting royal icing, but my own personal experiments have always been a bit of a disaster. My personal opinion is that glaze just tastes better. The bite is much softer while still hardening enough to stack, it balances the taste of the cookie perfectly, and I prefer the slightly shiny appearance to the flat matte finish of royal.

How does a crazy perfectionist such as myself get the detailed results of royal icing without sacrificing taste? FEAR NOT!! I’ve come to find a solution to my taste vs. design quandary. I use a “semi-gloss” glaze for the base icing and any wet-on-wet designs then I add an ingredient of royal icing to pipe more intricate details and textures. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

Let’s start with the glaze. It was a little tricky to nail down exact ingredients amounts for this recipe because I honestly throw the ingredients in a bowl following a general ratio and feel it out until I get the right consistency.

Ingredients:

4 c. confectioners sugar (+ extra to thicken icing as needed)

6 tbsp milk (+ extra to thin icing as needed. I use fat free milk)

3 tbsp light corn syrup

1 tsp clear vanilla extract (clear, so it doesn’t mess with your icing color!!)

Throw all of the ingredients in a mixer with the paddle attachment on low to avoid bubbles. You can also mix it by hand! As you gain more experience with the glaze you’ll figure out what consistency works best. Experiment with adding more sugar or milk until you find it. It should be thick enough that it won’t drip off the sides of the cookie but thin enough that the icing will smooth out to an even layer. If you’re going to make wet-on-wet icing designs (see a future post!) you should make it a little bit on the thin side. You can drizzle the icing in your bowl with a fork and judge the time it takes for it to smooth back out. (It’s fun too!!!) It’s tricky to explain, but it should look about like this:

You can also test the consistency by scooping icing into a tip and pushing it through to make dots on waxed paper to see how they behave before you go through the trouble of bagging it.

In my humble opinion, glaze just tastes SO much better. I also prefer the slightly shiny appearance… but not TOO shiny.  This is where the “semi-gloss” comes in. I use a higher ratio of milk to corn syrup, not equal. More corn syrup makes for longer drying time and the finished product isn’t quite as opaque as I would like. I use primarily milk to thin out the icing and try to keep about a 2 parts milk to 1 part corn syrup ratio.  This gives it the semi-gloss finish I prefer.  If you’re going to draw, paint, or pipe on top of the base layer you should let the glaze dry overnight.

NOW. For those times I want to pipe details or textures with a little more lift than the glaze I thicken the icing with a bit more powdered sugar then mix in about 1 tsp of meringue powder which isn’t enough to mess with the overall taste of the cookie. It also dries a lot faster like royal, which is great for layering designs! Maybe this is cheating on my glaze, but it was a game changer.

As I’ve said before, every cookie-ist (I’m going to make up all sorts of words here!) must experiment and find the methods and recipes that work best for them. In the few years I’ve been learning and changing my recipe this is what I’ve come up with to make my best, tastiest, prettiest cookies!

Next time I’ll explain some basics on piping and flooding to get you started cookie-ing!!!! WOOT WOOT! Until next time, peace, love, and cookies to all!

-Erin

(here’s a printable version of the recipe!!)