Icing Cakes – A Quick Reference Guide

There are several different types of icing used to cover cakes, some of which go by more than one name! This can get a little confusing, especially for beginners to baking and cake decorating. In this post I’m giving a quick overview of the different icings I use and some of the other names I know them by. At a later date (not too late I promise!) I’ll do a more in-depth post on each type, which will include instructions on how to make and use them.

Hopefully I’ve managed to get all of the common names for these icings, if I’ve missed any please let me know and I’ll update accordingly.  Some of the icings listed below have more than one use which I’ll touch upon, but at the moment I’m only concerned with icing as a cake covering. Anything that is primarily used for sugar craft I’ll cover in a separate post. Right so let’s get started, oh and the pictures show examples of me using that icing. I've tried to use pictures that I haven't posted before where possible!

Water Icing aka Glacé Icing
A classic icing, and probably one that most people made as children! This really is the simplest icing you can make, as it only needs water and icing sugar! This icing is pretty adaptable as you can easily adjust the consistency to suit any cake or biscuit. In addition to this because the basic recipe is always white this icing is great fun to colour and it’s very easy to add whatever flavour you want. Sometimes I use lemon juice instead of water and spoon it over hot cakes for a quick lemon drizzle cake that is pre-iced.

Water icing is made by mixing small amounts of water into lots of (sifted) icing sugar and mixing until you get the desired consistency. Just be careful when adding flavours and colours as these will affect the consistency!

Buttercream
This is one of the simplest toppings you can make for a cake and it’s highly versatile. Buttercream is made by simply creaming together butter and icing sugar and adding some flavouring, the most common of which is vanilla. Once you’ve got a nice smooth, thick and spreadable consistency it’s ready to use. Take care however, as using shortcuts like melting or warming the butter will only produce an oily icing, so where possible allow your butter to get to room temperature before starting!

Buttercream is great for filling sandwich cakes and topping all manner of cakes, I often pipe or spread it onto cupcakes. This icing is highly adaptable as by adding a couple of drops of food dye and changing the flavour you can match it to any flavour of cake. Some of my favourite flavours include: chocolate, cinnamon and rose.

Frosting
Now I expect that many people include buttercream under the umbrella term of frosting, but when I mention frosting I’m usually referring to cream cheese frosting. Which happens to be my favourite type of icing, it’s so tasty. I include marshmallow and meringue frosting here too, but those are slightly different so I won't discuss them here. 

Commonly found on carrot cakes and red velvet cakes, this icing is made in pretty much the same way as buttercream only with the addition of cream cheese.

Sugarpaste aka Fondant Icing
When you buy a premade birthday or Christmas cake this sugarpaste is normally what has been used to ice it. This type of icing is a popular choice when decorating cakes, and is very simple to use. To be honest I’m not entirely sure how sugarpaste is made but since it is widely available in shops it really isn’t necessary to make your own. Sugarpaste can be used to cover cakes by simply rolling it out as you would pastry and draping it over the cake, however it also has uses in sugarcraft as it is very easy to use for model making.

Sugarpaste is sold in pretty much any colour you can think of, and white sugarpaste can be coloured using food colours (or by kneading blobs of coloured sugarpaste into it). It is naturally extremely sweet however it is possible to buy flavoured sugarpaste (for example lemon and chocolate). This is usually only available in specialist cake decorating shops though. Shop brought sugarpaste can be kept for over a year if stored in an airtight container in a cool dry place.

Royal Icing
Another icing that has two uses, royal icing can be piped and used as decorations or used to cover cakes.  It dries hard and is very brittle once dry which means you should be prepared for breakages (and lots of them) if using this to make decorations!

This icing is quite simple to make, but does behave differently to other types of icing. Royal icing is made by beating together egg whites and icing sugar to create a thick smooth icing. Some recipes call for lemon juice but I never add it. To thicken royal icing you must never add extra icing sugar as this will ruin the proportions in the recipe, to thicken simply beat the icing for longer. If you require a runnier icing add a tiny bit of water (literally drops). When made this way the icing is perfect for use when piping decorations, if you want to cover a cake with it add some glycerine.  This addition means that while the icing is still hard when dry it won’t be as brittle, so it won’t crack so much when you actually cut the cake!

When used to cover a cake royal icing is either used to create a perfectly smooth surface (common on wedding cakes) or a rougher textured surface that makes a great snow scene on Christmas cakes.

As royal icing sets hard it needs to be kept in an airtight container when not in use, but if left alone in a cool, dry place and perfectly sealed it can be kept for months.

So there you have it a basic overview of all the different types of cake covering, I haven’t dealt with marzipan here as that is usually hidden under royal icing or sugarpaste. I hope this post is helpful in some way. As I said as the start, at a later date I’ll discuss each of these in more detail and discuss the icing used in sugarcraft.