I just made some cookies using royal icing with egg whites (I usually use meringue powder). They looked fine when I iced them, but over the next few days the colors faded considerably and ran. Anybody have any idea why that would have happened?
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Do you mean that the colors were "runny" in that they did not dry? Or do you mean that colors "bled" into one another as they dried? If the latter, chances are you used too much water to egg white or the overall icing was too loose to start, and it took too long to dry. As with any type of royal icing blend, you can get bleeding of colors if dark and light colors sit too long next to each other while wet. Usually, I work with my icing as thick as I can for the task at hand, and the colors set nice and fast without bleeding or fading.
They bled. It sounds like the icing wasn't stiff enough to start with. Thanks!
Blue-Eyed Bakery posted:They bled. It sounds like the icing wasn't stiff enough to start with. Thanks!
That would be my guess.
Also, did you use cream of tartar? I find it keeps white icing whiter longer, but also helps to keep colors more colorfast.
Let it dry for more time!!! I' m the anxious type and that doesn't help, do other cookies in the meanwhile, have a shower or siesta but don't fill it until it has dried completely. Hope my tip works, afterwards, let us know. In my case, I call it the trap of cookies anxiety!!!
Cheers,
Sil
Me again after some time LoL. I have learnt really RI must be thicker as Julia said, less watery, lets say a 20 seconds consistency so they do not bleed but anyway, Jill Wettestein does lots of wet on wet in 10 seconds consistency and i have never seen her colours bleed. So, same consistency is really reallyyyy important. Another thing to do is to make your colours and let them rest for 1 or 2 days, specially difficult colours as black, red, deep blue. In my case, we have got really bad quality in our colorants so i always try to do my colours with this anticipation. I cannot obtain americolor, chefmaster and others suggested continously everywhere. This part of letting colours rest is so that you do not use excessive ammount of colorants that also helps ugly bleedings to appear. Leaving them for 1 or 2 days makes that you can add colours in different times, less quantity and colours really darken with time.
And today i have learnt from Julia, reading these posts that we DO NOT have to use white colorant for our RI or glaze (this is usually recommended so that colours gain better intensity) but the real thing here is that that white colorant adding helps RI to dry in a longer ammount of time so, the more these colours are wet one on the side of the other, more they bleed. So white colorant makes the RI stay wet for more time, and that would explain how excessive colorant for RI (meaning to intense colours) make them bleed as well
So resuming:
- thicker RI, here i mean a 20 sec one
- but maybe the better is using same RI consistency so they don't dry in different times(if this happens, it will bleed too). So this way you could go for a 10 seconds wet on wet.
- make colours with one or 2 days ahead, and more if they are intense colours as black, dark blue or red.
- do not use excessive colorants or add white colorant to all your RI batch: this makes RI to dry in a longer time: resulting ugly bleeding
Hope this helps. This is based on my experience, things i read and Julia's answers in these posts.
Kiss, perhaps writing again in a few months, do not know! LOL
Sil
