Pumpkin season is coming. Which means... you're going to need some puffy icing to get all that gorgeous texture you've been dreaming about all year. There are 2 things you need to know if you want puffy icing.
First -- and really, this is ALWAYS the first thing you should think about when making cookies -- you need the right icing consistency. For regular type puffy icing, when you draw a line through the icing with a knife, it should take at least 15 seconds to disappear. But if you want crazy-puffy type icing, it needs to be closer to 19-20 seconds before it disappears.
My new test for puffy icing consistency sounds a little passive-aggressive, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I stir it all up and then while the surface of the icing is all uneven and you can still see the stir lines, I bang the bowl on the counter 5 times. If the surface has smoothed out... I call it good. I'm just a little impatient these days and have decided that 20 seconds is entirely too long to wait to see if I need to add a little more water or powdered sugar.
The second thing you need to know about puffy icing is -- Keep your tip down. Your icing tip should be close to the cookie, forcing the icing to pillow up around it.
**And as an added bonus... if you leave puffing icing in your piping bags over night... you don't have to re-stir them in the morning. What could be better?!
NEED MORE?
More about too-thin icing here.
A whole lot more than you ever wanted to know about icing consistency here.
...and my super lazy method for getting the consistency right every time HERE.
Find out which cutters I used to make all these pumpkins here. (A hint -- NONE of them were actually a pumpkin cutter.)
