My 11 year old daughter is trying to ice a cake in royal icing, neither of us have tried this before. How do you get the icing smooth before it is crusted?
I know to use fine sand paper when we are finished but there are way to many rough spots to sand!! It is her 4 H project, so she really needs to be doing it herself!!
Any suggestions will be appreciated!!
Thanks, Pam

Now there are a lot more experienced folk out there, but this is what I did for my RI iced cake in my photos (pink with white brush embroidery)

I beat the RI a lot, until fluffy and added piping gel until is was soft. I spread it on then quickly used a wide putty knife to hold against the cake and then spun the cake on it's turntable, holding the knife very steady, to scrape off the bumps and smooth as much as possible. This you do for several coats and it seems interminable. When I finally couldn't take the aggravation anymore I thinned out the RI a lot....it was pretty runny...then I spread it on the dummy to fill in the valleys. Smoothed again as best as possible with my putty knife. Once I even wet a sponge until damp, then spread my thin RI on, and wiped off excess with the sponge.

I still had to sand it....and you can see it's not perfect by a long shot. But that is what I did.

Thank you for your suggestions! I will get out the pipping gel!!

Royal Icing Help
http://www.imaginativeicing.demon.co.uk/homepageframes.html

Go down the bottom of the page - click "sugarcraft"
Select "Royal Icing"
Select "covering" from the box in the upper Righ-Hand corner ..