Easter egg cookies. Photo by Jennifer Melo

Last year, I tried my hand at Easter egg sugar cookies with royal icing. But most of the royal icing recipes I found called for meringue powder (and I didn’t have any on hand) or raw egg whites (and with young nieces, I didn’t want to risk salmonella poisoning.)

Royal icing without eggs or merengue powder

I finally found a recipe in a cookbook that simply called for icing sugar, water and some lemon juice. So I tried it.

I tinted the icing with green, red, blue and yellow (not shown here) food colouring.

Royal icing for Easter egg cookies. Photo by Jennifer Melo

You can tell that the consistency of the icing was a bit too watery because there’s some run-off on some cookies and the shapes I tried to pipe didn’t hold too well.

Drippy Easter egg cookies. Photo by Jennifer Melo

When I tasted the icing, it was quite lemony but I thought the icing flavour was quite good. My niece Aliya disagreed. It seems the tartness of the lemon juice didn’t please her palate. Noted for next time: Too much lemon might be off-putting for kids.