Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Joy Harris. And I'm going to show you how to make swirl frosting. I'm using a meringue powder, it's more or less royal icing, that's what it's called. Some people know it as a royal icing or a meringue powder icing. And it's a very white, beautiful icing. And what I'm going to show you today is how you can create a swirl effect, like I have here on this little turkey. Just take a small amount of the icing, place it in a smaller bowl and you really don't need that much. And then, add several drops of food coloring because you want this to be a very dark color, so it'll contrast with your white. Now, I'm using a purple, but you can use any color you like, I guess you know that. But there are two types of food coloring that are very common. This is a liquid food coloring that I'm using. And that's fine because my icing is fairly thick already. But there's also a gel food coloring that you can use, if you don't ant to add anymore moisture to your icing. But you can see how quickly and easily that stirs up. If you want to get all the food coloring in there, you can just take a spoon, scrape it off. And then, blend it in, so you don't have any white streaks. Now, there's two ways to do this. One, I frosted a turkey cookie earlier and the effect will be a little different. And I'll show you this one first. You just take small amounts of the frosting on the end of a toothpick and you just kind of dab them on your cookie where you think you want the concentration of swirls. And I'm just using a toothpick to dab it on there. And that way, I know I won't overdo it. And then, with another toothpick, here's where your creativity comes in. And you just swirling the frosting. Now, the frosting on here is almost dry. If it were completely dry, you couldn't do this. But you cut through the cookie or you cut through the frosting with a toothpick to create a swirl effect. You can do it in a lot of different ways. Now, you can see how I kind of played with it here and I would take this and drag the frosting across, the purple frosting. And then, you go back through and then, you drag another line in another direction. And you can see how it creates a swirl effect. Now, if you want something a little softer, to do that your frosting needs to be very wet. So, I'm going to add just a little bit of water to my meringue powder frosting and then, stir this up a bit. Because it's been sitting out for just a few minutes. But when I make up a big batch of this, I like to put it in small bowls, cover it with paper towels. And then, that way I can use whatever consistency I want by adding more water to it, or whatever color I want. And this is a little thinner, it's tinned out quite a bit with just that little bit of water. And I'm going to immediately frost my gingerbread turkey here. And for this one, I think I'll leave his head turkey color. And then, you use the same frosting and I'm going to set my cookie down, I'm going to, I want to put globs of it, little small amounts on the turkey with the toothpick. And if you try to use the spoon, I end up putting on too much. But you know what, I think I'm going to add a little more water. See how thick that is on there. Just add a touch of water to this and I might be able to show you how to swirl two different ways on one cookie. And you can see how this is very very runny. And then, once again with the toothpick, it's going to be very, very runny, you can put drops of it on here. And then, you can see right on this cookie, the different effect it'll have because the frosting is thinner. And the purple frosting is thinner as well. You can play with it a little easier, swirl it around. And you see that this was the thicker frosting that I used and that one's going to give you a little different effect. When you use a thinner frosting, it's more like a water color. When you use a thicker frosting, you can pretty much determine exactly where it's going to go and it's not going to spread. But you can see here how this kind of swirls around on its own. Once you've done this and you've practiced, you can create any variety of swirl cookies. That's how easy it is.