Royal Icing Stenciling Technique
What is Royal Icing?
Royal Icing is one of the older medium used in cake decorating, producing intricate and elegant designs. The skills needed are the same piping skills as buttercream techniques. From basics such as dots, lines, stars, swirls, scrolls and ruffles; to pressure piping, flowers and brush embroidery: to exclusively royal icing such as stringwork, extension work and run-outs.
What is Stenciling?
Stenciling is a technique of using stencils (thin pliable plastic with intricate laser cut design on it) to imprint a design onto cake. It can be done using buttercream on buttercream cakes or royal icing on fondant cakes. Both mediums need to be in stiff consistency to get a clear and detailed outcome, aka not smudgy.
The stencil shown is from the *Designer Stencil brand. Unfortunately this design is no more in stock but I have a few that are my favourites from this brand. The *chandelier stencil is still available.
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Royal Icing Recipe
Ingredients
- 250g icing sugar
- 40g egg white
- 5 to 6 drops of vinegar
- 2 tbsp icing sugar
Directions
- Sieve icing sugar
- Add egg white and beat with hand mixer
- Add vinegar and beat
- Add 2 tbsp icing sugar and beat to turn it from soft to stiff consistency, like peanut butter thickness.
How to Stencil a 3-tier Wedding Cake
Watch my video on Youtube
Painting on Royal Icing Stencilled Design
Besides the elegant white on white, if you want a standout royal icing stenciling design, introducing colors would give contrast and clearer detail. There are two methods of coloring a stenciled design. First is by coloring the royal icing before spreading in onto cake. Second is painting on the royal icing design after it has dried. As with the picture shown, edible gold paint is painted at selective parts of the design, giving a different look with the same stencil used.
Conclusion
Royal icing stenciling is among the fastest way of decorating the sides of a cake. The recent trend of vintage cake design making a comeback is also a good time for royal icing, with the advantage of it being able to harden and not at the mercy of weather and humidity.
