Why is my royal icing cracking?

Why is my royal icing cracking? We’ve all been there: you’ve iced this beautiful cookie and then suddenly you realize there are these cracks on the surface of the flood icing. They can look as severe as the ones in these pictures, or they can be even more subtle.

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What causes the royal icing cracks?

The short answer… from moving the cookies too much while the icing is drying! At the early stages of drying, the very top laying of the flood icing has crusted over while the bottom layer is still quite wet. If you move the cookies too much at this stage, the wet icing underneath will push up against the delicately dried layer on top and move the surface causing these cracks (I’m sure there’s a more scientific way to describe this, but this is what makes sense to me).

The larger crack on the clover above comes from the fact that I picked the cookie up from the stem (bad idea!) and the weight of the rest of the cookie caused it to bend slightly resulting in the crack.

Generally speaking, I find that they kinds of cracks tend to happen in the larger cookies with a larger flood surface area.

How can you prevent the cracks from happening?

The first rule of thumb is to move your cookies around as little as possible while they are drying. If you have to pick them up, be mindful to keep them as flat as possible while they move and make sure to pick them up at the sturdiest point in the cookie. And be extra careful with the larger cookies as this tends to happen more often with these.

While I’m an “expert” cookier, I’m still not immune to these kinds of issues! Cracks still happen to me every once in awhile (especially when I’m being impatient/moving too fast), but I just don’t take pictures of them so I don’t have as much evidence 😉

Hopefully these tips and tricks have given you a bit of insight into why your royal icing is cracking!

If you’d like to learn more about troubleshooting various issues with royal icing, check out this post.

Other posts you might be interested in:

• What Is Royal Icing: A Beginner’s Guide
• My Royal Icing Recipe
• My Cookie Recipe
• Royal Icing Consistencies
• How to store royal icing (more detailed instructions)
• Troubleshooting Royal Icing: Common Problems While Cookie Decorating
• How much icing per cookie
• All of my favorite cookie decorating supplies
• Left-Handed Cookie Decorating
• Cookie Decorating Practice Sheets