All about FROSTING! (Tips, tricks, and random tangents)

So it's been a little while since my last post but I really am going to try to be more consistent in the future. This post is going to be all about FROSTING!! Yummmm. I love frosting. It's what separates cupcakes from muffins, and where you can have all the creative decorating fun you want with your cupcake creations. Every once in a while I like to practice different piping techniques or try totally new ones. Because it's just for practice, what I usually do is buy some pre-made frosting from the store and just add some powdered sugar so it achieves a good firm piping consistency.

If you try to pipe with store-bought frosting (without any additions) or buttercream that has had too much milk added to it, any design you try to make will probably look melty, droopy, or otherwise sad and unappetizing. So if that's what you're going for, perhaps if you're throwing a sad, droopy cupcake party, pipe on with that thin frosting! Otherwise, powdered sugar is your best friend in the world. And don't ever melt your butter when you make buttercream (more on that in a later post), it's the baking equivalent of cutting your own bangs! When my frosting has the consistency of softened ice cream, that's usually when I stop adding powdered sugar because at that point it will hold its shape pretty well. 

Moving right along, I think pre-made frosting tastes super nasty and has this gross chemical undertone, but I figure if the frosting I practice with is just going to get thrown away, why waste all that butter?? Butter is surprisingly expensive and it seems like such a waste to practice with real buttercream. I could go on and on about butter prices but I'm sure no one cares about it as much as I do (that's a good thing)!

So...the techniques I practiced today (in no particular order) were the hydrangea flower, pom poms, two types of piped rose, and a ruffled stack. I only used two types of tip for all of these, the Wilton 1M and Wilton 2D. There is seriously so much you can do with just one type of tip, depending on your grip, speed, angle and distance from the top of the cupcakes. I would probably be just fine decorating with only my 1M and 2D, but I'm a crazy cupcake supplies hoarder so I have over a dozen tips, as you can see below. Permission to judge.

We'll start with the ruffled stack, created with my Wilton 2D tip. The trick to this technique is to keep the pressure on the piping back consistent (lest you end up with a lopsided pile of frosting), and to go SLOWLY. Moving the bag along slowly allows the frosting to sort of fall on itself, creating the ruffle-y goodness. When you get to the top, it's super important to take all pressure off the bag and slowly pull away, or you'll get this weird curl on top, a cupcake cowlick, if you will. 

You may have noticed that there are tinges of purple in some of this frosting. I tried a new dye technique as well, where you stripe the insides of the piping bag with gel dye, so when you squeeze the frosting out, the edges are colored, so there's a bit of an ombre effect. Done correctly, it looks absolutely beautiful. Clearly this is not what transpired with this little experiment, so it looks a little bit funky. 

Next, I used my 2D tip to create a piped rose. The 2D tip is a closed star, so the rose it creates is a little more angular and puffy than when using the 1M tip (which will be a little further down). It makes a really pretty rose; I also attempted the ombre effect in this frosting, and it turned out a little bit nicer, I think. 

Next, I practiced something new to me, some pom poms! I also used the 2D tip for these, and the trick is to keep the piping bag fairly close to the cupcake, press down a little once you start squeezing, and then pull up pretty quick once the frosting starts to flow so that you form a cute little star. You can make these however big or small as you would like, but I chose to do many small ones.

Also new to me are hydrangea flowers. I used my 1M tip for these, and while I don't think they look bad, per se, I wouldn't necessarily think "hydrangea bouquet" looking at this design. So I will probably have to retool this one a bit. Also, you can see that I gave up on striping my frosting and just made the whole thing purple. You know how the old saying goes, if at first you don't succeed, give up and dye your frosting PURPLE!

The last technique I practiced was one I am pretty familiar with, the tried-and-true 1M rose. I decorated my mom's birthday cake with these (see my first post!), and I think they are just gorgeous. For these roses, it's important to guide the frosting, instead of letting it fall on itself, and keep the layers of the rose close together. You start in the center of the cupcake and work your way out in a spiral, and when you reach the end of your spiral it's super important to stop piping and just sort of drag the end of the frosting along the outer edge of your rose to incorporate it.

I had some leftover frosting so here are just some examples of different borders you can pipe. Most likely you would use these to create a border on a cake, but you could probably use them on a cupcake as well, I just never have. On top we have a shell border, then a thick ruffle border, a star border, and then a loose ruffle border.

Thanks for sticking with me and reading this blog! I think for my next post I will be trying to make some vegan cupcakes, so wish me luck and keep tuning in! Adios!