Sparkle Smarter: The Best Way to Use Edible Glitter on Cookies

Edible glitter: the cockroach of the crafting world. Once it’s there, it’s never going away, no matter what you do. This world will go through another Ice Age and new dinosaurs will be roaming the Earth, and edible glitter will still be floating around, mark my words. It’s an absolute menace….but it’s so prettttttttyyyyyyyyy!

In the interest of full disclosure, I personally find it almost impossible to resist the lure of adding a quick spritz of sparkle dust to my finished cookie sets. It can make the whole set shine (literally), or it can even hide small imperfections that probably you, the cookier, are the only one who can see anyways, but under a layer of edible glitter, no one else has a chance of noticing. 

It’s also super effective when confined just to royal icing transfers that you’ll attach to your completed cookies at the end, really making the transfers stand out even more. 

Coming in silver, gold, and all the colors of the rainbow, the sky is the limit for using this pretty tool. And although edible glitter will stick to anything and everything to a certain extent, it works best when applied to a wet or even slightly tacky surface. Spritzing glitter onto a fully dried cookie will definitely leave some sparkle, but it’s very likely to wipe away or transfer to the inside of your cookie bag upon contact. 

That being said, if you have ever forgotten to spritz your wet royal icing transfers with sparkle dust before they have dried, it’s not the end of the world.

If you have ever seen bakers working with cake pops, they often coat the chocolate-covered pops with glitter by filling a small bowl with nonpareils and some edible glitter and rolling the cake pop around in the mix.This evenly coats the cake pop with the glitter dust in a really satisfying way. 

Doing the same thing with royal icing transfers, however, won’t work exactly the same, since chocolate has an inherent tackiness to it that dried royal icing transfers don’t have. Essentially, the glitter wants to stick to the chocolate—not so much the dry royal icing.

You can work around this little hurdle by giving your transfers a quick spritz with Everclear (or other high proof alcohol) before dropping them into the bowl with the nonpareils and glitter. Everclear evaporates quickly, so no need to worry about anyone actually ingesting it, but it will give the glitter something to stick to.

 A quick stir with a paintbrush or other tool will completely coat the transfers in the glitter that will stick and stay on the icing instead of just wiping away.

Whatever you do, DO NOT use water instead of the alcohol. 

Water will immediately cause pitting in your royal icing, and you’ll see it in the finished result. If you don’t want to use alcohol and you have an airbrush system, you could alternatively use airbrush color to apply a light coat of color to the transfers to give the glitter something to stick to. 

Once you are done, you can either leave the nonpareils and glitter as-is (if you think you’ll use this assembly again, there’s no sense in wasting anything), or you can dump the contents of the bowl into a fine mesh sieve that will catch the nonpareils and let the glitter fall through. Use a small funnel to pour the glitter back into the original bottle, and you are all set.

And that’s it—a simple hack for getting blinged-out royal icing transfers. Now go forth and sparkle on!