Helpful Tips for Writing with Royal Icing

We frequently get asked for tips about how you can improve your writing technique for writing with royal icing, so we've compiled our best tips into this blog post! 

Consistency 

One of the most important parts of writing with royal icing is making sure the consistency is right.

Too Thin: If your icing is too thin, you’ll notice your letters spreading out into each other as you write, or as the icing dries.

Too Thick: If your icing is too thick, you’ll notice that you have to apply a lot of pressure while you write, and the lines of the letters are breaking off as you’re writing.

Finding the right consistency will take some trial and error. Experiment with your icing consistency until you find what works best for you! We find that a 15-25 second consistency works very well for writing with royal icing – similar to that of peanut butter.

Pressure

How much pressure you apply to your piping bag will determine the size and thickness of your lettering.

If you’re writing with a non-script font, try to keep your pressure the same for each word – this will help the line thickness stay consistent.

If you’re using a script or cursive font, you’ll need to vary your pressure – these types of fonts typically require a combination of thick and thin lines.

A general rule of thumb for piping script fonts is to use less pressure on the upstrokes and more pressure on the downstrokes.

Piping Tips

The tip that you use will make a huge difference in your writing skills. I always reach for a PME writing tip.

You’ll notice that some tips have a seam in the middle, which could cause your icing to change direction as it comes out while you’re writing. PME tips don’t have this, which makes them ideal for many writing projects.

Product Links

PME Writer Tube 1.5

All Piping Tips

Tipless Bags

When you’re writing with royal icing, you’ll want to lift your icing tip up from your surface more than you would if you were writing in cursive with a pen or pencil.

In the graphic below, you’ll observe Sarah lifting her tip from the parchment paper in between most letters, and sometimes in between different strokes of the same letter. If she wrote in just one continuous motion without lifting her piping bag, the flow of the icing would become too heavy and could create letters that are too thick, or that spread into each other.

Finally, the #1 thing you can do to improve your royal icing writing is practice! Watch our Instagram Reel below to see our favorite way to practice writing.