When I first started decorating cookies, my biggest struggle was consistency of my royal icing. Yes, I knew about the three different thickness of icing but little did I know that sometimes you needed 5 different thicknesses. It took me an entire summer to get my icing just right – that and experimenting with different ingredients. One would think that now is the time to celebrate, right? Well, before we get too excited let’s throw some good old fashion HUMIDITY into the mixture!!
Living in Ontario, humidity can happen at any given moment! Working with humidity and royal icing can be a disaster in the making. Not only does it affect the drying time it can also cause colours to bleed into one another. We can go from pretty cookie to ugly cookie overnight. I’ve seen this several times when all of a sudden that pirate face I’ve decorated looks fantastic when I leave them to dry only to check on them the next day and find they look like something from The Walking Dead!! Eyes that droop down to the chin, mouths dripping – need I go on!!??!!
Once humidity is in the air I know I need to have at least 48 hours for my cookies to dry and use other tricks that I have up my sleeve. In a perfect cookie world there would be no hot and humid days or rainy ones either. Until that day comes I will continue to experiment, decorate and create.
