My pictures have turned out awesome, but the icing white icing over all of it makes it too thick. I tried to do it without putting the white over it, but it wouldn't come off the paper onto the cake.

Is anyone able to get it on the cake relatively flat? I need suggestions for not having a big hump!

You can make it the size of the entire top of the cake, then the whole top of the cake is level and you can add a border where it meets the sides. Or you can just put a border around the edge of it, that's what I do.

It *is* possible to do one with no white back coating, but you have to work very carefully and I think it depends on the design. HEre's one I did: http://forum.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1290361. With it being a chocolate cake, I didn't want the "plaque" look. I froze it between every step (pipe the black outline .... freeze; Pipe the ivory face color....freeze). The only thing I had to add when I put it on the cake was the cigarette smoke.

Another suggestion is to blend the edge of it into the cake. On this Hare Chevrolet logo, I did that: http://forum.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1269686 You can barely see the edge of it at the top. The bigger you make the white backcoating, the easier it is to do.

Here's an example of where I didn't make the backcoating big enough to work with: http://forum.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1359544 I couldn't get the hot spatula close enough to blend it down into the cake without danger of damaging the image. The bottom and the bottom right blended a bit better ... you can see at the top where it didn't blend very well. So even tho' this is a crappy looking image, I think it's a good visual of the technique I'm trying to improve on! (We learn best from the not-so-good-cakes, right?)

I thought about trying to make it the whole size of the cake too, but i didn't know if it would stick to the uniced cake. Debi- actually that last pic was the most helpful! Why did you freeze in between every color? What is the difference there? Thanks so much, I'll try both ways. I've only tried it twice before.

I froze between each color because it was a small image. I had noticed on previous ones that I do the outline first, then when I add the next color, sometimes the outline icing would move. So I froze it to add some stability. It seemed to really work well. So now, no matter how big the image is, I freeze after working with some small areas.

Debi inspired me to try one tonight with no back coating. It was SpongeBob. His body came out beautifully, but his arms & legs broke off, they were too narrow. It's nice & flat on the cake, though. There's really not any difference in the height of the fbct and the parts I had to pipe on the cake to fix it.