Icing sugar is not something I use much at all, but it does pop-up as a recipe ingredient occasionally and it can be nice to finish-off a cake with a dusting of icing sugar, or top a cupcake with butter icing.
Some time ago I realised I couldn’t find icing sugar package free or plastic free, so I turned my attention to making it myself (find out how to make brown sugar here).
You won’t believe how simple it is!
Just blitz regular granulated sugar with a blender until it becomes a fine powder.
I use my stick mixer because I don’t have a blender and my food processor doesn’t do the job well enough.
Most recipes on the internet, like in the video below, will tell you to add one tablespoon of cornflour to one cup of sugar before blending, because cornflour is added to commercial icing sugar and because it helps with the consistency. But for my home baking purposes, I haven’t found it to be a necessary ingredient. Which is good because I haven’t found plastic free cornflour anywhere.
Now that the icing sugar has been made, how cute is this Moccona coffee jar that I am reusing?!
Never mind the mess I made getting the sugar into the jar; that’s proof of how powdery you can get it.
It’s one of four Moccona with Peter Alexander 2018 Limited Editions and I knew from the moment I saw it on the supermarket shelf that I was going to reuse the jar to store some pre-made icing sugar – cupcakes being the perfect way to distinguish this jar of white powder from all the other jars of white powder in my pantry (I use paper tags to label those).
Just so you know, Moccona is the coffee I drink so this wasn’t purchased just for the jar. I actually went to buy this coffee and discovered the new packaging. I think it’s a good example of designing packaging to encourage reuse. That’s something we need to encourage. Another example of this in our house is the Toy Story drinking glasses which are actually reused jam jars. It’s obviously a marketing ploy to create collectables like this, but when it’s done in this way, I don’t mind. The drinking glasses were a useful addition to our home as our family grew and made it easy for the kids to identify whose drink belonged to who.
Hopefully, the government’s recent commitment to ensure all packaging will be “recyclable, compostable or reusable” by 2025 will result in us seeing more packaging designed for reuse in the near future. Let me know if you come across any.
Gippsland Unwrapped 
Just looking at my baking basket recently, I realised very soon I’ll run out of icing sugar. I don’t use it much but sometimes it adds that little extra to a plain cake. I’m definitely going to try this once I’m out of icing sugar.
Source bulk food store does sell organic icing sugar but it’s $11 a kilo
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Thanks Zan. That’s good to know it’s out there somewhere for people to access if they can!
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I accumulate Moccona jars from home and work, and reuse them in all sorts of ways. One of the best things about them is labelling – the plastic inner lid comes off! Just put your label inside the lid and reattach the plastic inner. For dry goods etc, I cut out the label from the original packaging to use and stuff it in there.
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That is a great tip!! I had never thought to put a label in that part of the lid, thanks.
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I’m going to try this! I don’t have a blender and had tried the food processor previously with minimal success, but this looks like it could be just the ticket! Thanks!
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You inspired me to try something this week. It wasn’t icing sugar but you’re tip about using a stick blender to grind the sugar inspired me to try the same with Flaxseeds. I had been intended to trial replacing egg with them but then learned that i needed to use flaxseed meal and not whole flaxseeds. I tried grinding in a pestle and mortar, no joy. I tried whizzzing them in my blender, no joy. Then having read your post i tried the stick blender and joy of joy, it worked. This saves be buying yet another piece of kit! Thank you. Eggless muffins were great too!
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Oh that’s awesome, thanks for sharing the joy with me! I totally get it. 😃👍🏻
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Nice! Yes, whole flaxseed mostly pass through our body undigested, so it’s good to grind them first. Some energy bar companies don’t bother doing this – I think they are more interested in the perception of healthiness than in healthiness itself! (Also ground flaxseeds would go rancid faster than whole seeds – another reason why processed food is often tosh!).
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