i was asked to make a damask cake for a wedding..i bought the stencils but my question to others who have stenciled is this..the cake will be buttercream at brides request..which would be better to work with,royal icing or buttercream and another question is..how can i get my buttercream the deep black that the wilton cookie icing is? im excited and scared at the same time for this cake..ive always wanted to make one!! just dont want to mess it up!

i use royal icing with my damask stencil. . . .. . . . . .just make sure your cake is chilled before hand so the buttercream won't be sticky )

thanks so much..so the royal icing wont run if i chill it afterwards?? or do i leave it at room temperature afterwards?

I leave mine out until it dries. As long as you make the icing stiff it shouldn't run.

If you are using butter cream frosting I wouldn't use royal. I tried this on my brother wedding cake this month after someone suggested royal and it melted as soon as I started stenciling the cake. It was a disaster. The morning of the wedding royal melting the entire side of my smooth cake. I had to scrape off the butter cream frosting and re frost and smooth the entire tier. If you insist on using royal I would try it on a small sample cake. If you were using fondant then royal is the way to go. I will never use royal for stencils on butter cream again. Before you start to stencil your cake take a piece of wax paper or cardboard and test out your stencil to make sure you get the perfect consistency. It needs to be thin enough to smooth but not to thin that it will run under your stencil.

I chilled my cake and the royal still melted. As for making black start with brown and then black. You won't have to use as much black gel. Since you are using black I would really make a trial run. Mine was a light butter cup yellow with white stencil so it was a little more forgiving. Make sure you hold your stencil down well. If you have to get someone to gently hold the right side. I had my daughter help me. It's kind of hard to hold and spread the frosting at the same time until you get started and it's really easy to accidentally get frosting under the stencil.

I used Sugar Veil with my stencil (see black and white cake in my pics). It was on fondant though, not sure what it would do on bc, but it refrigerated without incident, and stayed slightly shiny and puffy looking which I really liked. The cake was bc, but I did a wide strip of fondant on the middle tier and applied the stencil. Don't know if this is any help.

Tinygoose I so want to try sugar veil but it's so pricey for all the tools. Maybe someday. Did you have to use the tools or just mix the sugar veil icing and smooth on?

I like your idea about the sugarveil tinygoose. Your cake looks great. I did royal icing on fondant and it was so dang hard. I have decided that I will never to a stencil on a round cake again.

Terrific cake, tinygoose. It's always so nice to see those smooth, sculpted-looking edges that SugarVeil makes.

imsobubbley, for an intense or dark color (especially black), use black powdered mixed into dry SugarVeil before adding water. Otherwise, gel or liquid color works fine.

You can use any type of craft store stencil with SugarVeil. There are two different techniques:

1. Stencil SugarVeil thickly onto a greased silicone mat or parchment paper. Roll the stencil back slowly so the decorations can "grab" the excess SugarVeil and create a nice, rounded and sculpted shape. When set, place the pieces onto the cake one-by-one like we did on this ganache cake (the process would work exactly the same on buttercream):

2. The other technique is to smooth a section of SugarVeil, colored to match your buttercream icing, into a paper-thin sheet. Allow the sheet to set, and then stencil another color of SugarVeil onto the set SugarVeil sheet. You can then wrap this sheet invisibly around your smoothly-iced buttercream cake. We used this technique to stencil the SugarVeil logo, shown on the cake below. We also made a bow from a sheet of green SugarVeil stenciled with white SugarVeil.

You can stencil SugarVeil onto a strip of fondant, too.

WOW!!that is super nice!!! i didnt know you could move your stencil like that.!!! soooo looking into this!!