a cup and insert your tipless piping bag into the cup, folding the edges of the bag over the top. This allows you to have two free hands to fill your bag.
2.Add about one-third of the icing in the bowl to the piping bag.
3.Pick the piping bag up out of the cup, squeeze the icing to the bottom of the bag, and tie it off. Rubber bands can be used if the bag is too full or if you have trouble tying.
Flooding consistency is going to take the most practice out of any skill in this book. Be patient, and don’t be afraid to ditch anything that isn’t working and start over. Flooding icing is a thinned-out version of your piping consistency designed to self-level and create those smoothly iced cookies you’ve been drooling over.
Let’s go! You have a bowl with two-thirds of the icing left in it ready for you.
4.Turn on your faucet to a very slow dribble. You are striving to achieve the texture of soap or honey. Take a moment to flip your bottle of honey upside down for reference. Just like with color, you can always add more water, so start with a very small amount!
5.Keep adding water and mixing until the icing smoothly falls off your spatula and slowly settles by itself. The icing should still be thick, and the process of self-leveling shouldn’t be immediate.
Troubleshooting your flooding icing: If your icing is too thick and will not settle, remix with a little more water. Flooding icing that is too thick has an easy solution, but there really isn’t much you can do for icing that is too thin besides starting over. Don’t get discouraged when you have to throw the icing away. It will all be worth it when you have perfect cookies and don’t have to fight the wrong consistency during the entire icing process.
6.Once you have that texture nailed, transfer your icing into your piping bag while it is in your cup. Icing will naturally settle in the tip, so all you need to do is tie off the bag.
Repeat with all your colors! The process is tedious and can take a large amount of time. During the holidays, I spend almost an entire day just mixing and bagging all the colors! It will be worth it when you get to sit with your cookies in front of you and all your colors are ready to go, so be patient!
Tipless Bags vs. Tips
Welcome to the debate. There is no right or wrong answer here, both have their own pros and cons. I learned to decorate with tips and slowly transitioned to tipless bags over time using only specialty tips (some of which are featured in later chapters). Here is my take on each of them.
Tips
Using tips is really helpful when you’re a beginner. It gives you consistent piping lines and even amounts of flooding icing coming out. You don’t have to worry about cutting the correct hole size, and you can freely change the tips if you’re using a coupler (no shame in looking up the definition). If you’re willing to purchase tips, I would recommend a full set so you have a variety of specialty tips that are fun to play with. When using tips, I prefer using a size 2 to pipe and a size 10 for all your flooding; you may develop a different preference, but it is a good place to start. The amount of added washing was really what drove me to transition away from them.
Tipless
Moving on to tipless bags, which is what you will see featured in all the photos, they are bags specially designed to be used without tips by snipping off the ends to create your desired thickness. I love them so much I designed my own; they are super thin and disprove any of those rumors you might have heard about tipless bags! It can be frustrating when you cut the wrong size hole and have to re-bag the icing, but to me, it’s worth the disposal aspect of the bags. I can’t stress enough that this is all personal preference. You can create equally beautiful cookies with and without tips! Some of my baking idols use tips, but you do you!
Notes
•All your colors are mixed, now what? Any leftover royal icing in your mixing bowl should be transferred to an airtight container; it will stay fresh at room temperature for about two weeks. Icing separation is totally natural and unavoidable, so make sure to give the royal icing a good stir before using again. You may notice separation within your piping bags as early as an hour after preparing. Massage the bags until the icing in each bag is one uniform color before you decorate.
We’re here to decorate! Your cookies are baked, your colors are mixed, and by this time your patience is wearing thin—but you’ve made it! Let’s learn how to decorate. We’re going to dive into all the basics. Really master this chapter before moving on to the next chapters, which full of fun designs. Add a bookmark, because you will be referring back to this chapter often!
All those colors you worked so hard to mix? Let’s put them to work!
•Snip a small hole in the tip of your tipless piping consistency bags. Give them a test on a flat paper towel for easy cleanup. You are trying to achieve about the thickness of a permanent marker line.
•Snip off more of the bag if the hole is too small. If the hole is too big, transfer the icing into a new bag and try again! The flood consistency bags should be snipped to a width about twice the size of the holes for the piping consistency bags.
•Once you get a sense of how large the hole should be, you’ll be doing this in your sleep, because you repeat this process on every. Single. Bag!
Before you dive right into those cookies you spent all that time baking, let’s get some practice on some paper. I know, I know—BORING—but this is a great place to get some practice in without wasting your cookies. Can I suggest making a copy of the template to practice on? Place the template on a cookie sheet and cover it with plastic wrap; this allows you to throw away the plastic wrap when completed and start again fresh without printing out a million copies.
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