Tips for Making Thick Icing

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you some really quick and easy icing recipes and how to decorate holiday cookies. Okay, for our next frosting which is going to a thick frosting, you're going to need one cup of shortening, two teaspoons of vanilla extract, four cups of powdered sugar, and four tablespoons of milk. That's all we're going to need, and we're also going to need a bowl that's big enough to mix everything into to, I recommend something like this. Alright, so let's get started. Once again, for this recipe I recommend using a fork for the same reasons as the last one. So, what we're going to do first, we're going to add our shortening to the bowl, and if you've ever worked with shortening before you know that it helps it if it's not hot, but just a little bit warm. If you get it hot, it starts running, but just a little bit, like room temperature or so. Right now under these lights you can see it's melting nicely but it may not melt so well if you had it kind of chilly. What we're going to do next is we're going to add our powdered sugar in, not all at once, just a little bit at a time, actually I'm going to take my spatula for this, it might be a better implement to do this with. We're just going to creme the sugar in with the shortening. What that means is we're just going to work them together. You want to be careful, don't make a giant mess, because this powdered sugar can go everywhere, and what's going to happen is the shortening isn't going to soak up, or isn't going to adhere to all of this because the amount of powdered sugar is going to kind of out weigh the amount of shortening in here. So what we're trying to do, we're just trying to get it mixed up a little bit before we add the milk to it and vanilla. As a matter of fact, let's go ahead and add the vanilla in there now, it just gives it a little extra liquid, as well as the milk. You got to be careful using the vanilla and milk together, because if you we to mix it together before hand, if you're using real vanilla, the alcohol in the vanilla would curdle the milk and that would not be good. So, now you can see I've got like a, like a cottage cheesy looking consistency."