Making ds a Mr Men cake, need help with icing please!

[boogiewoogie]

Okay, I'm going to bake a simple Victoria sponge cake then cover it with white glace icing before I pipe Mr Strong (his favourite character~) on it with a birthday message. Now I've got a piping kit and I know how to pipe chocolate using greaseproof paper but I would like to do this in colour. I know that you can get icing pens from supermarkets but I would like to make it instead. What's the recipe for this sort of icing to pipe the outline of the character. Also, how does one colour in the character? Or do I need to buy one of those roll out icings then colour it in red?

any help would be very much appreciated thank you!

You can make the roll out icing yourself with icing suger and water and put red food colouring in while you are mixing it.
We made perpermint creams over Christmas and you would make this in exactly the same way.

Eeek PEPpermint

I made a Batman cake once and ended up painting the food colouring on all over to get the right intensity of colour. Worked quite well.

I'd buy red ready mixed icing as it is the easiest way of getting a good strong red. For other colours you can mix food colouring to white icing, but for red you'll just get a feeble pink (IME). The last time I looked tescos did a multi pack with 3 colours including red but not red on its own.

I found the pens pretty rubbish and agree with Peaches that painting food colouring can work ok (but still not quite as good as the ready mix).

Chopping up bits of liquorice would be an easy way of making eyes etc.

have fun!