Royal Icing

It's a tradition in our family to make gingerbread houses in the run up to Christmas. The kids absolutely love doing it; they lose themselves in festive creativity and we marvel over their beautiful creations for days! However, we need royal icing to construct and decorate the houses, which usually requires egg whites....but not my recipe! It contains just two cheap ingredients: chickpea brine and icing sugar!

This icing is smooth, glossy and hardens quickly. It's perfect for holding gingerbread houses together, but it's also great for icing cakes in general and for writing in icing.

First of all:

Drain a few cans of chickpeas and keep the brine. Put the brine in a mixing bowl and whisk on high speed until it looks foamy, like this:

Next:

Take 1 cup of the whisked brine and transfer to another mixing bowl.

Add 4 cups of icing sugar and whisk again until the mixture is totally smooth and shiny and forms peaks when you remove the whisk. It should look like this:

Then use as needed! Here are a couple of pictures of the kids' gingerbread houses this year:

If there's any left over brine, I use it to make vegan meringues and I use the chickpeas themselves to make a big chickpea curry (I often end up freezing half of it for an easy future meal).

Enjoy!