You may end up on the top of a congested city, perhaps terrain depending if you had a full instrument failure / disorientation.
Not if you have a half decent GPS, and nobody should be doing IFR (and IMHO VFR nav too) without at least the instructor having a GPS running constantly.
Icing conditions do remain a problem in the winter for even low altitude flight, but in most conditions of 900ft base and 2300ft tops, stratus, there is very unlikely to be be ice in there. Much depends on the surface temperature of course; if it is say +3C or warmer, you have an obvious escape route. I am a whole lot more fussy about icing conditions if the surface is freezing too.
But given the above cloud example, it is likely to be full of holes, and with blue sky above. Perfect conditions for teaching IFR nav, above it. The other possibility is a fairly typical winter high pressure situation where it is just a well defined, thin but uniform layer.