I am doing a disney princess themed cake in a week or so and have finally decided on the design. I want to put 'vine' type stems on the cake round the top edge to cover where 2 different colour fondants meet and at the base, some parts will just be curled around as decoration and others will lead to fondant roses. I did think about using fondant but it may be too time consuming and am wondering it would be less uniform in thickness than using an icing.

Would an icing be better to pipe on to do this design or do I just stick to what I know and use fondant?!

I have looked at royal icing but 'recipes' seem to all have meringue powder and am I'm in the uk, I can' find this is stores!

I use icing to pipe vines, but be careful and practice with it beforehand if you've never done it before. When I see a lot of vine cakes it looks more like a turd with flowers on it creeping up the cake. Look at some pictures of real vines, and you'll see how you can pipe them to look more realistic. I think that buttercream or royal icing would actually work better than rolling out a snake of fondant, because that's when you get the "wrong" look more often than not.

Thanks, I think I'll have a practice with icing and see if I can get the look I'm going for. I'm not trying to go realistic so think I'm ok there. That sounds bad but I'm going for quite a simple 'curly' vine just to fit in the with disney style and colours.

How about royal icing? That's what I used.

Royal icing powder from the sugar shelf just make it up is easy. Egg white powder is sold on Dr Oetker website on line store. I usually buy the Silver Spoon Royal Icing Sugar. You can get recipe for royal icing using fresh egg white which I would not recommend. If you are wanting to use fondant how about a clay gun that would give uniform thickness.

I have used both royal icing and thinned buttercream, and both worked well. The key is practicing before adding the vines to the cake.

You don't need the powder...just use egg whites...here's a recipe for you from the allrecipes.com site. It has reviews and apparently it's a good one. Several said they had to add a bit more powdered sugar to thicken it...I bet they just didn't beat it long enough.

* 4 egg whites
* 4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
* 1 teaspoon lemon extract

Directions

1. Beat egg whites in clean, large bowl with mixer at high speed until foamy (use only grade A clean, uncracked eggs). Gradually add sugar and lemon extract. Beat at high speed until thickened. NOTE: When dry, Royal Icing is very hard and resistant to damage that can occur during shipping/handling.

HTH!