How To Learn Puffy Royal Icing Lettering Technique

There is one 4-letter word that can just make a cookier’s day like nothing else: puff.

Oh, the glory of lettering that has dried just as puffy as it was the moment you applied it—truly a sight to behold. Cookie groups are full of photos of decorated cookies with captions like “that puff tho” and “can we all just admire this puff?!” Followed by lots of oohing and aahing over the results. The opposite of that, though, is the posts lamenting “whyyyyyyyyy” or “what happened to my puffy lettering?!” with lots of cookiers commiserating in the comments. So let’s talk about some things that can help and some things that can hurt.

(For the sake of this post, I’m going to refer to lettering, even though all of this same information applies to any small sections you may be adding on top of a flooded base.)

Don’t: The worst thing you can do is pipe puffy lettering on top of a fully-dried flood. That dry icing will start to absorb the moisture from the freshly-applied lettering on top, causing the small areas to develop holes in them that are called craters. Ugh, they’re the worst. It’s so depressing when you spend a lot of time getting your lettering just right, only to come back later and find that it looks like someone poked a bunch of holes in the letters.

Do: Allow your base icing to dry just long enough that it will be able to support the new icing you are going to apply on top without denting or crushing. When the base icing still has moisture in it, it’s less likely to pull from the new icing on top.

If, for whatever reason, you aren’t able to add your lettering before the base icing is dry, you can do a couple of things:

• Make a squiggle of stiffer-consistency icing across the belly of the outlined letters before flooding them in; this will give your flood icing some support and ideally keep it from sinking. Or,
• Once you’ve outlined your letters, use the tip of your scribe to gently poke a bunch of small holes within the outlined spaces before flooding them in. This one falls into the camp of “this might be a (new) old wives’ tale,” but some people really swear by this method. If you ever watch a cookie tutorial and see the cookier poking a bunch of small holes before adding icing over them, they’re trying to ward off craters. Whether it works or not, I’ll leave up to you to decide, but if you’re struggling with craters, you’ll likely be willing to try anything! Or,
• Change up your font style and do one that requires skinny lettering or pressure piping instead of letters that require outlining and filling. These kinds of fonts can typically use icing that is a little stiffer, so it is less likely to crater by nature.

If you come back to find that some of your lettering has cratered, it’s not the end of the world—even though it may feel like it at the time. I find that if you pipe a small amount of your thicker flood icing into the crater and then use an impeccably clean fingertip to just swipe over top of it, the crater is mostly hidden (depending on how bad it is and in how visible of a spot on the lettering). You may still notice it, but it’s likely no one else will.

Don’t: Use a thin flood consistency icing to fill in your lettering. Thin flood doesn’t have enough body to keep itself from sinking, so it can look flat and underwhelming, even if it doesn’t necessarily crater.

Do: Use a slightly thicker flood consistency. You don’t want it to be so thick that the icing won’t settle, because it won’t look nice and smooth (especially if it retains the marks from where you have had to poke and prod it with a scribe to try to get it to settle into place), but you do want it to be able to have enough body to stay puffy instead of sinking.

If you're looking for a more in depth guide on royal icing, check out my online class Royal Icing 101 here!

One last thing that can make a huge difference is using a fan or dehydrator; the faster your icing dries, the less likely it is to crater. I am a huge fan of my dehydrator, and I swear by it now! Pop your cookies in at the lowest temperature for 10-20 minutes, and you should see a huge difference in your results.

Here in this video you can watch Sarah use the techniques mentioned above to create puffy lettering using royal icing. You will notice that she switches between two different consistencies, a thinner and thicker flood. This is very important when creating puffy lettering. She is using a #1 writing tip for the thinner flood used for outlining.