Learn how to make a simple real fruit icing that includes freeze dried strawberries.

Mini waffles drizzled with strawberry icing with a pat of butter on top and surrounded by freeze dried strawberries.

Icing Made from Fruit

I can’t remember where I first heard about this idea, but many years ago, I came across someone who suggested mixing freeze-dried fruit with sugar to make a fruit sugar that you could sprinkle on all sorts of things. I took that idea, swapped regular sugar for powdered sugar, added some water, and ended up with an icing that I use to decorate sugar cookies at Christmas time. It’s become a tradition in our family.

But why should the cookies have all the fun? When we were planning to make a Valentine’s Day-themed waffle board, I decided it would be a good time to test the icing on waffles. As you can imagine, the results were unanimous—my family loved them. Read on to get my easy instructions and recipe so your family can love them too!

Freeze dried strawberries are in a container of Magic Bullet being ground up into a powder.

Freeze Dried Strawberry Powder

Freeze-dried fruit has grown in popularity over the last decade. It’s pretty easy to find in most grocery stores. Nearly all of them will carry strawberries, as they seem to be the most common and popular flavor. Of course, you can use whatever type of freeze-dried fruit you can find—all of them are going to be delicious.

The reason for this is that freeze-dried fruit has a super concentrated flavor. You don’t need a ton of it to add a lot of flavor. It’s much more flavorful than any type of extract or artificial flavoring. The best part is that it’s the actual fruit!

It’s pretty easy to make the powder you’ll use for the icing—it just needs to be blended up. You can do this in a full-size blender, but I prefer using a Magic Bullet. I think it does a really good job of turning the strawberries into a fine powder. Just make sure that when you stop, you open it up slowly, as some powder is likely to go into the air.

From Powder to Icing

If you’ve ever made any kind of icing before, this is really simple. You’re just adding the strawberry powder. Combine that with some powdered sugar, and then it’s a matter of turning it into icing. You just need to add enough moisture to get the right texture. I do this slowly, a little at a time. You’d be amazed—once you hit the perfect amount, it will suddenly come together.

As for the moisture, you can use water. However, if you want to make it creamier, you can use whole milk, half-and-half, or even heavy cream.

❤️ I used this Freeze Dried Strawberry Icing as part of our Valentine’s Day Waffle board.