Hi, I’m Kourtney!  To be honest, baking and cooking never came easily to me.  I’ve always been creative and artistic, but for the longest time I had no idea how to do anything with food.  When my daughter was born 10 years ago, she was born with a genetic disorder that meant she had to have a special diet for the rest of her life.  In order to accommodate her diet and medical needs, I had to learn some basics of food science, nutrition and a lot of cooking and baking from scratch. 

This was about the time I started seeing beautiful decorated sugar cookies all over the internet.  I thought it would be so fun to make some unique sugar cookies and did not expect it to be difficult at all.  Even though my skills in the kitchen were improving, decorated sugar cookies proved to be way beyond my abilities.  I made a lot of really ugly cookies and royal icing was so hard to master I quit trying for a long time.

A few years later I had some down time and ended up watching hours and hours of YouTube videos to figure out the mystery behind royal icing. I bought the prescribed materials, followed every instruction perfectly and finally made some beautiful cookies!  I felt like I had cracked the code and I was hooked.

I made cookies for everything: every birthday, holiday, work function, family event.  After a couple of years of cookie-ing, my cookie hobby became an official business.  There is so much conflicting information from cookiers about how to make the best royal icing, what to do to avoid color bleed, how to get a shiny finish, what ingredients to add or eliminate, etc.  It can be incredibly frustrating as a new cookier to know where to start. Not everyone has the time, patience, or resources to try all the methods and all the recipes.  We just want to make beautiful cookies!

I played with a liquid egg white recipe that tasted great but it made my budding cookie business really difficult.  My colors would bleed, it took forever for the icing to dry, the finished icing dried matte, I couldn’t freeze and reuse icing without having blotchy colors which meant I wasted a lot of unused icing, and I couldn’t get a good puffy texture like I could if I used meringue powder.  It was very time consuming, inconsistent, and wasteful.

I just knew it’d be so much easier to have a meringue powder I could just buy off the shelf, ready to use, without having to add a bunch of ingredients to get the beautiful results I was looking for.  There was nothing available that met my needs so I started mixing my own powdered ingredients, researching, experimenting, testing different methods until I got a combination that worked best.

The meringue powder I developed made my job faster and my customers loved the taste.  I figured if this product was helping my cookie business be more successful, there were likely others out there who could benefit from it too.  And that’s how I started offering Royal Batch Meringue Powder to Cookie Queens everywhere.