I am wanting to do a royal icing transfer for a bday cake this week can someone please let me know how to do this.. thanks

I sent you a pm about the SpongeBob cake.

Hi LoriMc, could you send me the instructions as to how to do a royal icing transfer as well? is it anything like forzen buttercream transfer?

LoriMC, I too would love the instructions if you dont mind sharing!

Keyshia

Let me start by saying I am not the authority when it comes to RITs. This is just the way I do them, and there may be a better way. I found they came out cleaner looking than FBCT, so it's pretty much all I do now by way of character cakes. Here are the instructions I regularly send in pm's regarding RITs. If you are interested in how they look, check out my gallery. Thanks!

"It's basically the same instructions as you would see with color flow. Here is what I wrote to someone regarding the snowflake cake I have in my gallery. It had two cardinals on it, so that is why I am talking about birds in this message. Let me just add that if I have black on my RIT, I always try to do it first and let it dry before putting another color next to it...especially lighter colors. I have had the darker color bleed into the lighter one and it helps if it has time to dry first! Ok, enough of that...here are the directions. PM me if you still have questions.

Basically, I found two pictures of cardinals on the internet, then printed them out in the size that I wanted for my cake. These are what I used for the cardinals RIT. Not sure if you need the directions for RITs, but I will include it just in case. You may find more info on them if you do a search on cake central. It's basically the same thing as color flow.

Tape your bird pictures down on something flat and hard. I used a wooden cutting board, but I have also used cardboard. Cover them with separate pieces of wax paper and tape them down. (I think some other people use parchment instead of wax paper- you might want to check.) Make a batch of royal icing in a stiff consistency. After you color your icing, pipe out (#3) an outline of the bird in the stiff consistancy. Let the outline dry for 10-15 minutes. Now take your red icing and put a LITTLE (I'm talking drops here),bit of water in it. It doesn't take much! You want the consistency to be like melted ice cream. If you take your spoon and dribble the icing, the lines in the icing should take about 10 seconds to disappear. If you get it too watery, your RIT will be thin and may break easily. Also, I have noticed if you are using several colors and you get the icing too watery, the colors will run. Now you can fill in your outline with the thinned consistency. Make sure you put enough icing so that it meets up to the top of the outline. This needs to dry for at least 2 days before you try to take if off of the wax paper. (I have taken it off sooner in a pinch, but the chances of it breaking greatly increase!) Sometimes when I'm in a hurry I will lay it near a space heater to dry faster. When it is dry, I have found the easiest way to get it off is to take a sheet of computer paper and slide it under the RIT. If it is dry all the way through it should come off easily. After I placed it on the cake, I used some black royal icing to pipe the crest and some lines on the wings. When the black was fully dry I added the orange beak.

RIT's may sound complicated, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. They look a lot neater than FBCT's. It's almost all I do these days, especially for characters or emblems. As the RIT sits on buttercream, you will slowly see the grease seeping into the royal icing, but it will eventually cover the whole area, and won't be as noticeable. Whew! I wrote you a novel! Let me know if you have any more questions!

Renee, let me add something I thought of as I was rereading this. I never put RIT's on a cake that has been frozen, or needs to be frozen. If the cake gets water condensation on it, like it does as it defrosts, the RIT will be ruined. Water really messes up royal icing. I am so paranoid, that now I never even refrigerate cakes with RIT's for fear of them having condensation when they come to room temperature."

Thanks for posting the instructions LoriMc!

BTW your cardinals look great!

I think that if you frozen your RIT nothing won't happen because I use it for my cookies and I froze them without a problem I just keep them cover with the plastic until they defrost.

thanks LoriMC for the great instructions!!! i've got to try it soon one of these days!!!

thanks for sharing loriMc, i've always read on here about those r.i.t's..

LoriMc I would have described colour flow that way exactly and I use it alot. It's very neat looking.

This might be a dumb question... but when you do colour flow the icing is hard... but you mention that the grease from the BC seeps up through the RIT... does this make the RIT soft like BC? or does the RIT stay hard like colour flow?

Mine stays hard. I also have not noticed any seepage. But you do need to let colours dry hard before putting another one next to them when you are making them.

It does soften it up a little bit, but it takes several days to do that. It does not however make the colors run.

I was worried about the hardness of it on the cake at first, but I usually tell people they can pull the image off if they want to. My friend's kids fight over who gets to eat it when they get a cake!

Thanks Lori.....

Lori,
your hints were very useful. I just finished preparing some outlines for my RITs (my first time) and I came across this tread.
I have one remaining question tough. I am planning a Halloween cake, and I want to put my RIT character on the cake with some buttercream "fire" on the base of it - therefore there would be some buttercream icing on top of the RIT. Do you think that this could work? Or would the buttercream start "leaking" the grease to the rest of the RIT?
Big Thanks to anyone who can reply!

Once you place a RIT directly onto a buttercream cake, the grease from the shortening will seep into the RIT, and you will see the colors slightly darken. I like to put a small amount of buttercream on the back of the RIT (GENTLY) before I put it on the cake. That way the process will go faster and you won't have the grease halfway up the RIT when you give the cake to your customer. It doesn't hurt the RIT, probably makes it a little softer in the long run, but that doesn't matter when it is already on the cake.

That said, I think you would be fine adding flames around the RIT. I'm sure I have done it before, and I will try to look for an example in my pictures.

I have been using Crisco for the past couple of years, and I just got some cans of shortening with the trans fat still in it. I need to do some experimentation to see if the grease still leaks into a RIT with this kind of shortening. I'll do that today and let you know what happens.

I had the butterfly RIT wings I made lying on the new batch of buttercream (WITH trans fat) all day yesterday. I never saw any grease leak into it! This must just happen when you are using Crisco, or any shortening that has had the trans fat taken out of.

Learn something new every day!