Question
terilynn reese
Do you have a way to make a piping frosting to flood sugar cookies? The liquid kind in colors for decorating.
Answer
It's not the cookie time of the year for me, but I do. There is a way to do it. So a flooding icing is usually made with egg white and confectioner's sugar, which is also called 10X. I do it with aquafaba. If there is anybody here who doesn't know what aquafaba is, let me know, or I'm just going to put us all on the same page, but aquafaba is the liquid that is left after chickpeas are cooked. So you can get it in a can, you can do your own. In "Essential Vegan Desserts," students learn how to work with it so it's reliable. It should always be reduced, canned aquafaba by about a third. When I'm doing it, I eat a lot of chickpeas. I cook my Rancho Gordo chickpeas in my Instant Pot with a piece of kombu seaweed that is said to make the aquafaba a bit stronger. No salt. Certainly no salt, no spices. Then I reduce it by at least a half until it's very viscous like an egg white. Powdered sugar is the primary ingredient, and you want to make sure if you're doing a vegan flooding icing, that your powdered sugar is vegan. All confectioners sugar that is labeled organic, excuse me, or fair trade is vegan. And if there isn't a V on it, almost all of the vegan sugars, confectioners sugars, the starch is tapioca instead of corn starch. So the vegan 10X, I call confectioners sugar 10X, but there are a lot more Xs. That's the one that's in the market, needs to be sifted more than once. And a little lemon juice in this icing is going to cut the sweetness a little bit. And then you really need to use a vegan gel coloring. The liquid colors are going to thin it too much. And I have noticed, and there are some companies that are working on this now, they're assuring us they're working on it, but the vegan gel colorings or the vegan food colorings are not as bright or as strong as the ones with the chemicals. So that's something to know. Now the key is consistency. So when you make your vegan gel icing, a good way to test it is to let a ribbon of icing fall back into the bowl. It should disappear into the surface pretty quickly. And then you can adjust the consistency with more aquafaba or more sugar. You use it thicker to pipe around the edges, and then you flood with the thinner icing. So, I hope that helps you. It'll be cookie time before we know it.
