How to Mix Ingredients for Royal Icing

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: Okay, so quarter cup of meringue powder per pound of powdered sugar is the dry ingredient recipe for royal icing. So, I got my meringue powder here, it's kind of the lemony sort of this yellowish stuff and so here we go. The whole quarter cup of that and that's going to go in and kinda sprinkle in like that. Good. Close this up, right. So, again, I want to kind of get the dry ingredient sort of well mixed up before I add any water. So, I might as well just do that with my spoon here. This stuff's going to get really, really sticky, so I'm not going to get my hands into it right yet. So, I'll mix that up, okay. So, now, in terms of water, how much water will this take? Maybe quarter cup might be too much. The thing is you really want to kind of do it by feel in the sense that just add a little bit at a time and then blend until it gets to a kind of a stiff consistency. And so I'm just going to kind of pour a little bit in there. That was about maybe three tablespoons or so, and I'm going to blend it and just kind of wait for kind of a consistency to develop. I can already tell that this is going to be a little too thick, so I'm going to add just add a little bit more. You want to do this sort of slowly and sparingly, because if your icing gets too wet, then you're going to have to correct it by adding more dry ingredients and then it just kind of gets kind of like a big mess, so here we go. This is starting to look good. I've put in, I would say, I put in maybe about a quarter cup, but again, you need to do it by feel. You need to do what is about the right consistency. If you can see this, it's starting to kind of look like an icing. I'm going to blend this up really good and once this is blended up--some people like doing this with an electric mixer to get it really, really nice and smooth. I'm just going to put a teeny, tiny a little bit of water and just a little bit, because again, too much, if it gets too runny, it won't be good for decorating. Yes, some people like to do this with an electric blender to get it really nice and smooth. I happen to not have one. So, I do it by hand and certainly in Mexico for hundreds of years, they did this by hand. So, I'm going to go ahead and mix this by hand. You can already see it starting to kind of get this nice, thick icing and when this dries, it will be really, really hard like cement, and so it's really good for making durable kind of decorative details on the sugar skulls. So, I'm just going to mix this up a little bit more and we'll color it and put in some decorating bags and get cracking. "