What is is used for? Is it like somewhere in the middle between butter cream and fondant. What's the best recipe for it?
royal icing is made from fresh or powdered egg white, icing (confectioners) sugar and water. It can be used to cover cakes but dries very hard and tends to 'shatter' when cut. most people use it to pipe shells or boarders around the base of a cake or write messages. it is piped or spread on a cake in a similar way to buttercream but is much harder on the hands to use and you have to use a ruler type tool to get a flat finish.
here's one i made covering the cake and piping it with royal icing:
http://www.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=558503
heres a cake covered in fondant with royal icing used to pipe the shell boarder and top loops
http://www.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=511683
hth
It is made from powdered meringue (like wilton) or from egg whites. It dries very hard. Generally it is made for making flowers or decorations that you want to dry very hard, or for piping details onto a cake. Do you remember "candy buttons" that used to come on that long strip of paper? I am pretty sure that was royal icing. Usually though people do not eat large quantities of it. Here in US, we do not cover cakes with it. The flowers on the cake on my avatar are made from royal icing.
agroeve- I looked at your cakes and they are beautiful. I have a question. Why use RI on a cake if it gets so hard? Is it because it's a display? Do some people like it better than BC?
I hope she answers, but I believe in the UK, the cake was/is traditionally fruitcake which will last pretty much forever. They used RI to make a hard "shell" over the cake, which only helps to preserve it further.
I agree the RI covered cakes are just beautiful!!
ri does prolong the life of a fruitcake. here in the uk ri was used to cover cakes long before fondant came about and buttercream to cover a cake is very rare.nowadays its rarer than it used to be because of turnaroud times. it takes at least 3 days just to cover the cake. personally i can't stand the non flavour of fondant icing and love ri as do most people i know but imagine not having to dowel a cake when stacking, with ri you just place the pillar where you want and if you need to move them there are no holes in your cake. i remember my siseters wedding cake (ri) she cut into it and the whole cake looked crazy paved but by heck it tasted delicious. the flower basket in my gallery is ri so is the handle i broke a few when making it and ate all the breakages. yummy
Royal Icing is also used to decorate cookies. Take a look in the gallery under "ccokies" and you will see alot of decorated cookies there using royal icing. It's fun to decorate cookies with because you can color it almost any color and thin it down with water or keep it thick enough to make decorations.There are also alot of great recipes here on the site for royal icing. 
I personally love royal icing and use it for all of my decorations on cakes. I don't have much luck using butter cream, it melts too quickly from the heat of my hands, plus I don't have A/C in my house, so I need something that can stand the heat like Royal icing. I use lemon juice in mine rather than water though. I think it gives it a nice flavor, especially since I use meringue powder which tends to have a weird smell and I don't want that to translate into a weird taste. Plus I've read that traditionally royal icing is made with lemon juice.
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