Reply to "My flooding tends to mottle"

Not sure. Honestly, I find the various "second rules" sort of inconsistent/unreliable in their application and never use them. Everyone counts at different speeds; it's easy to lose focus when counting or to start counting earlier or later than you did the last time; you typically need a looser flood icing to cover a larger cookie without leaving tracks, but you can get away with a thicker one on smaller cookies . . . I have certain ratios of water to icing "glue" (my starting icing recipe/thickness) that I think work more reliably. But after a while, it just comes down to how the icing looks and feels. I push it as thick as it can go on a given cookie, or in a given area, without leaving tracks.