I just finished a cake that had quite a bit of printing on it. I tried the gel transfer method and using a pin to poke thru the letters into a piece of styrofoam to make a pattern in the paper to press into the icing.

Neither worked

The icing was completely crusted-had set up overnight. The gel sometimes picked up the icing. The paper with the pin hole pattern made very few marks in the icing & the icing stuck to that also!! I even tried a larger needle-one for cross stich.

One negative was that the letters were rather close together. I printed the message in a font size of 48-but the freehand writing I did was bigger than that! I ended up free handing the writing & that was easier!

So...any tips on what would make printing on cakes easier??

Thanks!

..sorry things didn't work well. I love doing the pin-hole method! If the icing has crusted over then the paper certainly shouldn't stick to the icing. Did you use a crusting BC icing?

When I do pattern transfer, I use parchment paper, which never sticks to the icing unless there are damp areas on it. I am mystified as to why your icing would pick up off of the cake, unless you brushed it on way too forcefully, in which case you would have smashed the transferred gel to smithereens and it wouldn't have worked anyway.

I only use pattern transfer for messages on cakes and have never had the problem you described (8+ years).

What brand of piping gel did you use, did you pipe your message on parchment paper, and what tip did you use to pipe your message?

When doing writing on cakes I have done one of two things. I bought the letter imprinting kit from Wilton. The other thing that I have done it to do FBCT of the letters that I want and then quickly place them on to the cake, it only works with bigger font, you can also do royal icing letters.

i don't mean to sound rude or glib, but you could just practice (a lot) printing freehand. experiment with different-sized tips (#2-6) to get a feel for what works best for your style of printing. great thing about practicing piping is that you don't need a cake -- just something cake-sized like an inverted baking pan.

a trick i like to use for the sides of cakes (and the tops) is to pipe letters on wax paper with melted chocolate/candy coating in parchment cones, let them set up in the fridge, slide an angled palette knife under them and place them on a freshly iced cake (or you can stick them on with little dabs of icing, or stand them up in or against little rosettes). the options for the method are pretty endless, since you can do skinny letters or fat block fonts, or even connected script, etc. melted coating is of course runnier than buttercream, but once you get a feel for it, it's really lovely and you don't get those "tails" when you stop piping and lift off like with some thicker buttercreams.

aunt-judy...you certainly don't sound rude or glib!! You're right...there are sooo many options out there for accomplishing just the look you want on the cake!

forgive me, but what is FBCT ??

Frozen Buttercream Transfer

thank you

welcome

Sorry I'm a bit late with the follow up to this!
I used wax paper for the gel transfer-I don't think I pressed too hard, I have done this before on cakes (for the picture) & it worked ok. I used Wilton pre colored gel in the tube.

Crusting icing--I used 2C crisco to 2# pwdr sugar. Is it the ratio of crisco/butter to sugar that determines if it crusts OR is it the amount of liquid added. It was not a really wet icing.

Thanks for your comments..appreciate them all !