Royal Icing Issues

Hi, NJturnedFL, Congrats on making your first post. I look forward to many more to come!

Is there a weather change?

Also, do you use egg whites or meringue powder?  If meringue powder then what brand?

Yes they were was a weather change. I live in FL and the first fail was in NJ. But I also had a success in NJ after the fail and a success in FL after the fail. I use meringue powder made by Wilton.

Humidity can cause problems with your mproyal icing.  I don’t care for Wilton meringue powder.  I recently changed to genies dream meringue powder, which I buy from creative cookier.  I use her recipe and it always works well.  Also, I always clean my bowl, beater and utensils every time with vinegar.  Any amount of fat can ruin icing.  The vinegar takes care of that problem.  Hope it helps.

I had icing last week that wouldn't dry and also looked very puffy in the bowl. Everything was the same as usual (I don't use the US products as we don't have easy access to those here in SA). What I think happened in my case is that I had added to much gel colour. I was struggling to get the right colour and added more and more. I threw them out before they were completey dry, so don't know if the icing would have flaked off. 

I took some of this over-coloured icing and added the same amount of fresh, uncoloured RI to it and combined it. Because the first had so much colour in it, the combined RI still had the right colour and it worked like usual.

Ah. Also interesting. In my case I was just making white so no food coloring was being used but that's very interesting 

@NJturnedFL did you get your Royal Icing issue solved?  I'd be interested to know what you did.