It Only Takes 2 Ingredients To Make Your Own Powdered Sugar

Part of the fun of baking is getting to use messy ingredients such as powdered sugar. Like glitter, it magically finds its way into every nook and cranny of your kitchen and all over you. Yet, it's a required ingredient for many sweet treats such as the cannoli pudding recipe that changed your life and the smoothest muddy buddy butter. 

Powdered sugar, also known as confectioners' sugar, is commonly used to create deliciously sweet icings and frostings. That sweet glaze on top of decadent canned cinnamon rolls and the white clumps of sweetness on crinkle cookies is all made with powdered sugar. It's also the main ingredient in American buttercream, whipped cream and royal icing.

Royal icing is the sweet hardened decor you find on intricately designed sugar cookies at baby showers, birthday parties, and bridal parties. Versatile and sturdy, it's used in the icing that comes with pre-packaged gingerbread houses. Sometimes it's even used to add a delicate blanket of sweetness onto fruit covered pancakes and waffles or a light dusting to perfectly fried funnel cakes.

Recipes usually call for confectioners' sugar when it requires a form of sugar that will easily dissolve and won't produce a grainy texture when combined with other ingredients. If you ever run out of powdered sugar or simply don't have enough, no need to panic. You can effortlessly create powdered sugar at home with just white granulated sugar and cornstarch. 

To make it as smooth as possible, you should use a blender because the blades spin fast enough to consistently pulverize the sugar. The key to good powdered sugar is its fine texture. You want to avoid chunks because it will make your icing, frosting, or hand-whipped cream very grainy. If you don't have a blender, a food processor works too. However, it will take you a lot longer to grind the granulated sugar into a fine powder and there will most likely be textural inconsistencies, as a food processor's blades don't work as well as a blender's.

Depending on how much confectioners' sugar you're looking to make, you'll need roughly one tablespoon of cornstarch for every cup of granulated sugar. If you use these exact measurements, it will make about one cup and ¾ cups of powdered sugar.

Once you know how much you need to make, put the sugar and cornstarch into the blender or food processor. Slowly increase the speed until you get to the highest setting and blend for a few seconds. Stop blending once the two ingredients look perfectly combined. Just like you have viable powdered sugar for that cookie recipe you wanted to try and you saved yourself from taking another trip to the grocery store.