The Best Frosting For Cookies (2024)

FAQs

Is royal icing or buttercream better for cookies? ›

If you want a neat and clean, beautiful/cute design on your cookies, go with royal icing. Most people who are decorating cookies in the first place are going for the eye appeal, so it's a popular choice. But if you value taste over looks, go with messy, delicious buttercream frosting.

Buttercream frostings rely on the main ingredient of butter and will be the most common type of frosting you will find in a bakery.

Although royal icing dries firm, it is still sensitive to its environment. If it comes in contact with any grease, oil or high levels of humidity, it goes soft.

Royal icing also dries a bit harder than traditional icing, yet still holds a shiny finish. Many bakers love royal icing because it's easily customizable and can be made thinner or thicker depending on your specific needs.

Start by outlining the cookie with piping-consistency icing in any color you choose. Then, use flooding-consistency icing to fill the outlined area, starting by flooding around the edges and working your way towards the center. If the flooding is inconsistent in thickness, redistribute the wet icing with a toothpick.

Meringue Powder in Royal Icing

Both create a very sturdy and stable icing that hardens quickly on top of cookies. Meringue powder, while containing eggs, eliminates the need for raw fresh eggs, but still provides the EXACT same consistency.

Corn Syrup: Corn syrup gives the icing sticking power and creates a beautiful sheen on the dried icing. I don't recommend skipping it, but you can if absolutely needed.

Swiss meringue buttercream is probably the most standard buttercream for pastry professionals. It is incredibly smooth, making it an extremely popular choice for icing cakes. Compared to American buttercream, it has a much stronger butter flavor, but is considerably less sweet.

Choose Italian meringue Buttercream if you:

need the stability to hold up very large layer cakes or intricate designs.

Buttercream is the most popular type of frosting largely because of its few ingredients and easy application. Classic buttercream requires beating butter into icing sugar until you reach a frosting consistency. It's not possible to over beat this type of frosting, so the longer you beat it, the fluffier it gets.

Can you use royal icing on cookies? ›

This thicker royal icing is perfect for the final decorations that sit on top of a cookie and make it so much fun. Remember that each flooded cookie should be completely dry before you start to decorate with piping icing. If it's not dry, your piped decorations will bleed into the thinner icing.

Cratering refers to the formation of small depressions or pits on the surface of royal icing cookies during the drying process, making it particularly frustrating because your cookies look fine as you work on them, and as it dries, these little craters start to form, and it becomes difficult to fill them in later.

The Difference Between Royal Icing and Glaze Icing

The main difference between the two icings is that glaze doesn't contain meringue powder like royal icing does. It consists of powdered sugar, water, corn syrup, and (here's why Cameo's looks so good...) AmeriColor Bright White.

To make icing for cookies, you will thin the icing with water. It should be thin enough that it smooths out easily, but not so thin that it runs off the edges of the cookies.