The usual method goes like this. You tip a spoonful of icing sugar into a sieve, hold it over the cake, tap the side, and a white cloud lands on the cake, the plate, the worktop and your jumper. Then a damp clump falls out in one corner.
A sieve is just too big for this job. It’s made for sifting flour into a bowl, not for putting a light even layer over a lemon drizzle. A dusting wand is the better tool, and they’re small enough to live in the baking drawer without getting in the way.
How a dusting wand works
It’s a little mesh ball on the end of a handle. You twist the handle to open it, fill it with icing sugar (or flour, cocoa or cinnamon), twist it shut and give it gentle taps over whatever you’re dusting. Because the mesh is a small ball rather than a wide sieve, the sugar comes out exactly where you point it.
I’d go for the OXO Good Grips Baker’s Dusting Wand. You open and close it with a twist of the handle, so there’s no fiddly lid. It’s sold for flouring tins and worktops before rolling dough as much as for icing sugar and cocoa, and it goes in the dishwasher. The clever bit is that one side of the ball is solid. Put it down on that side and nothing leaks out, which is more than you can say for most cheap wands.
Tips for a neat finish
Wait until the bake is completely cool. Icing sugar on a warm cake just melts in and disappears. Hold the wand a good hand’s width above the surface and tap the handle lightly rather than shaking it. If you’re dusting through a paper doily or a stencil, a wand gives you much sharper edges than a sieve does.
Don’t overfill it either. Half full is plenty for a cake, and it flows more evenly when there’s a bit of room in the ball.
Mince pie season is only a few weeks off. The OXO dusting wand on Amazon.
