The Pantry Staple That Replaces Raw Eggs In Royal Icing Completely

If you've ever decorated cookies before, like sugar or gingerbread around the holiday season, you've likely used royal icing as a base for all of your colored icings. Royal icing makes decorating cookies and confections simple and easy, and it's made with minimal ingredients. This means it's simple to whip up a batch and add food colorings to smaller portions for decorating. Traditional royal icing uses powdered sugar (also known as confectioners' sugar), egg whites, and water or milk to vary the consistency, and sometimes vanilla or almond extract is added to royal icing for flavor. While commonly used, raw egg whites aren't the safest or easiest ingredient to work with, which is where meringue powder steps in. 

Swapping meringue powder for egg whites in royal icing is incredibly easy. Simply combine two teaspoons of meringue powder with two tablespoons of water for each whole egg white needed in your recipe. It's important to note that meringue powder shouldn't be used as a swap for real, whole eggs in other baking recipes that call for eggs or in your morning egg white and spinach breakfast scramble. Meringue powder is a stabilizer, rather than a substitute for real eggs, because it's usually made from corn starch, dehydrated egg whites, a bit of sugar, and a few other ingredients for texture and shelf life. Apart from being a safer option, meringue powder is also the secret ingredient for shiny icing.

Meringue powder is a game-changer when it comes to making royal icing, as not only is it less messy since it omits the need for separating egg yolks from the whites and then measuring those egg whites, but it's also a much safer ingredient to use than raw egg whites. Raw or undercooked egg whites have the risk of containing Salmonella, a bacterium that causes food poisoning. Although you could use pasteurized liquid egg whites to avoid the risk of Salmonella, you're still left dealing with the gloopy, often messy egg whites in liquid form. Meringue powder, however, is clean and so simple to use, as it's made with pasteurized egg whites that have been dehydrated, eliminating the risk of any harmful bacteria.

Royal icing made with meringue powder tends to dry more quickly than icing made with raw egg whites, but other than that, most people cannot tell the difference in the final product made with meringue powder versus egg whites. You can still use food colorings to change the colors of the icing, just as you would with royal icing made with egg whites. Not only great for icing cookies, but you can also use royal icing to make your own homemade sprinkles. The next time you're ready to try your hand at decorating cookies, use our easy royal icing recipe that uses meringue powder instead of traditional egg whites.