I have been asked to do a particular design on a birthday cake and I am not very confident in myself with the FBCT. Is it at all possible to trace the design with buttercream and "flood" with buttercream like you do on cookies, on a cake?

I figure I need to use a high butter content buttercream so it sets up for the finshed product, but how do I make it thin enough to acheive the flooding technique?

it may be easier to use chocolate instead. buy a merkins/candy type chocolate in the colors you need. Then take your graphic (don't forget to mirror image it if it is a text graphic) and lay a piece of parchment over it. You should be able to see through it. Now use the melted chocolate in a bag and pipe the outline first. As soon as the outline sets, fill in the inside with more melted chocolate of the color you chose. Once that sets up, take more chocolate and pipe it all over the piece and almost to the edge. Let that set, peel it off the parchment and voila! you can place it right on the cake!

With limited resources for candy melts in the appropriate colors, is it possible to color the white candy melts with americolor and not have it seize up? also, not a huge an of the cruddy candy melt flavor...can this be flavored too?

Thinning buttercream won't work for flooding. I tried it once and it was a disaster! In order to get a thin enough consistency you can't have enough ps for it to look right. I'd try the candy melts. Good luck!

Ok...how about...if I make a nice crusting buttercream, can I do the image in Royal? I want to avoid an edible image (because they really are not all that edible...lol) and the FBCT, just cause I stink at them!

I bet you can flood with ri on a crusted buttercream. Spread a little crusting bc on parchment and see how it holds the ri. That shouldn't take much time or effort. Make sure the ri you flood with is colored, so you can see if it runs. It shouldn't, because it doesn't when piping. If it doesn't work, do the chocolate.
I have filled an outline with buttercream, not thinned, and smoothed with VIVA when the design was not intricate.

while you cant get the smooth effect of flooding with butter cream you can still use the same method.

I find the image i want, enlarge it to the right size and then trace it with a marker or edible pen so that when you flip the image over you can see it.
I then take my butter cream icing and pipe over the outline of the image.
I lay that image on the cake and then rub over it and it traces the image onto the cake.
Then i pipe it and fill it in with butter cream. Can remember what I have in my gallery but i am sure some of those in there were done this way. You can also star the design.
I also take a viva papertowl and will try to smooth down some of the design.

There is a method that is called Run-In-Sugar. You outline your image on your cake in black buttercream or what ever color you want to outline in. You fill it in with a mixture of powder sugar, corn syrup, and maybe water. I can't remember the measurements but you want it to be a flooding consitancy. You color that, and bag it then fill in your outlines. You can also use colored piping gel as well.

I have used color flow technique with RI on a few of my cakes (in pics see the dora, mickey, flag and butterfly cakes) and use like pastrypuff girl said with the choc. Let it dry and place on the cake

edited : sorry double post

can you add corn syrup or piping gel to make it a little more runny to pile it together? I don't know just throwing in a possibility. Maybe one of the more seasoned CC'rs will join in.

royal icing or run sugar is the way to go.