Cake Decorating Basics - Part 8

As promised, here comes the next post on cake decorating.

Here are some of the uses of petal tip. Petal tips are numbered 104 and 103 (this one is smaller compared to 104).
Following picture has petal tip, a round tip (no. 3), Leaf tip(no. 352), Leaf tip (no. 65).

 

Petal tip can be used to make a ruffle border. Icing consistency is medium and bag position is 45 degrees. Hold the bag so that the fatter part of the tip is to the bottom.

Same petal tip can be used to make a flower. Pipe the petals to form a circle and place some dots of different color in the center.

Since it is hard to show on a wax paper, I tried to pipe it on a flower nail to show. Here are the step by step pictures as to how they start.

Add a second petal..

Keep turning the flower nail and adding the petals to complete the flower.

Same tip can be used to decorate a cupcake as a flower. Here is how.. Start piping petals to the outer edge of the cupcake.

Then fill in the inside piping petals between the petals of the outer circle..

Pipe one in the center to complete.

Add one more..

If you move the hand while piping these petals in zigzag motion, you can get ruffled petals..

Now coming to the leaf tip. It is not just for piping leaves. Icing consistency is thin and bag position is at 45 degrees. You can use it to make a border too. I have used the tip number 65.

If the leaf tip doesn't join properly, that means the tip has to be opened a bit or thin down the icing. The tip I used is a new one and even after opening a bit, it didn't do a great job.

Coming to the round tip which is used for dots, string work, writing. Icing consistency is thin. I have shown different sized dots using the small tip. Use bigger one to make borders.

Making 'e' using the round tip.

Lines..

And writing. For printing, touch the surface start piping, lift and pull the line and touch the surface back to where you want to end.

See how the icing has breaks in couple of places, it can be fixed by adding some corn syrup or piping gel to the icing. It is recommended to add piping gel to icing for writing.

Best way to learn is to fill a bag with icing and pipe and experience the flow of it. There are plenty of good videos on youtube for cake decoration. Videos are better in explaining than words. And out of all the readers of this blog, there probably are only 1 - 2 % of people who are interested in cake decorating anyway.

Enjoy!!