Instructions

1. Fill a decorating bag with royal icing. Use a small, round decorating tip in the bag, or snip the very tip off the bag to make a small hole. Make the royal icing fairly thick in a piping consistency, rather than the thinner consistency typically used for flooding icing on cookies. Squeeze the bag to remove air pockets in the frosting.

2. Hold the bag at a 90-degree angle with the cake surface. Hold it vertically when piping scrolls on the top of the cake or horizontally when piping scrolls on the side of a cake.

3. Squeeze a small dot of frosting to start the scroll design. Drag the frosting in a clockwise swirl around the center dot. Bring the frosting down in a curve, making a reverse "S" design. End the "S" with another spiral running counter-clockwise, finished with another small dot at the center. Make this "S" horizontally along the bottom of the cake, vertically along a side, or diagonally at a corner. This backwards "S" is one of the most basic scroll designs, which can be used as the starting point for more embellishments.

4. Position the decorating tip directly against any point on the starting scroll design. Pipe the frosting in a "J" or "C" design, forming a sort of branch off the original scroll. These look best when branched off a curve in the "S" design, whether they run in opposite directions as the starting or ending spirals, or branch off the curve at the center of the "S."

5. Make even smaller curved shapes off of the secondary curves you made on the original "S" design. Think of this in terms of drawing branches on a tree, with progressively smaller "branches" building off the main "trunk" of the scroll design. Some of the curves can end with the same spiral and dot used to make the starting "S" design, while other curves might stop off without a spiral. Vary the thickness of the lines by squeezing the bag with more or less pressure and adjusting the speed at which you drag the decorating bag.

6. Pipe a curve that branches off of another curve design in the scroll work. Make additional curves directly beneath this curve, with each new curve descending in size from the original curve.

7. Pipe small dots in curve shapes instead of using only lines to make the curves in the scroll work. Squeeze the bag to place the first dot, stop squeezing when the dot reaches the desired size and pull the bag straight away from the cake. Reposition the tip beside the first dot and pipe a second dot. Continue this process to make even more dots to achieve a curve design.

8. Make a mirror image of the original design on opposite sides of the cake, if desired. Scroll work is a freestyle decorating technique, so it might be best to work on these mirror image designs simultaneously. Make a few curves on one side of the cake and repeat these actions on the other side of the cake.