Royal Icing Celebration Cake - Update

In my last post about this assessment cake, I said I would post some photos of the work in progress, so here they are! The cake still needs its finishing touches, but the piped 'S' and 'C' scroll boarders are now in place. These borders are quite difficult to pipe in a consistent way, ensuring that the size of each scroll is uniform around the cake and that the borders meet up in a neat way.

Royal Icing Celebration Cake

Hope you had a great Christmas and a happy New Year! Sorry for the break between posts - I had a particularly special Christmas as my lovely boyfriend proposed whilst we were in New York, so I have had a busy but exciting few weeks looking at wedding venues!

So, back to cake related talk! I am in the initial stages of decorating my assessment piece for a a cake decoration course that I am taking. I am pleased with how it's going and thought I'd post some photos.

I have flat iced the cake with a few thin layers of royal icing and then I piped a central border using a number three nozzle in white. I then over-piped this with a number two nozzle in white and then the final layer of over-piping was done in the finest nozzle - number 1. This top layer of over-piping was tinted cerise. Once the central border was dry, I decided to use some icing flowers that I had made a few weeks previously and arranged them inside the border, along with a piped greeting in pink for my mum.

Covering the board was fun but quite messy! I diluted the royal icing with Renwhite to make the icing for the board more resilient, so that it can withstand minor knocks. I would say that the consistency would be the same used for icing run-outs - about the same consistency as unwhipped double cream.

The final stages of decoration will be piping a rope border along the top edge and then a scroll border around the bottom edge. I'll also decorate the sides of the cake with the remaining icing flowers that I have. This dummy cake has taken quite a while to complete but I'm happy with it so far!

Will post pictures of the finished cake next week.
Becky Bakeswell x

Royal Icing Snowflakes

These delicate snowflakes are for a batch of Christmas cupcakes for my work mates and are definitely a labour of love. So far, I have piped 50 snowflakes, but I want to create more to compensate for the inevitable breakages once they are lifted from the baking parchment. I'll post pics of the finished cupcakes later this week. Until then, happy baking!