Intro to Piping Tips

Hello, my name is Anita Algiene. And I'm going to talk to you today about the basics of buttercream piping tips. So just generally, a piping tip is a metal. I prefer metal, you can go to the grocery store and get some plastic variations of these, but a metal cone-shaped nozzle that fits on the end of a decorating tube. And as the icing is squeezed through the tube, it creates a pattern unique to the shape of the nozzle. And there's several different types, and it's sometimes intimidating. You'll see all these different shapes and just wonder what it does. But generally, we wanna focus on these here. These are the tips that you will find most often. We have several drop flower tips. They're characterized by, it does actually look like a fat flower where it has a metal piece in the middle that keeps an opening open when you push the icing through, to keep it center. And you can always come back by and drop a center into these little flowers. The next is, we have a rose or a petal tip. There's several different sizes, those come as small. It starts at 101 and the largest is a 104. You could use those for roses, ruffles, sweet pea flowers. Another general shape is a star tip, categorized by all these little pointy cones. And as the icing is pushed through, it creates rivets. You can use it for boarders, of course stars. It's really beautiful for different kinds of scroll works and stuff, I use this one a lot. This one is your just your general leaf shape tip here. There's two different kinds of leaf tips. There's another one that is, it's kind of got a triangle cut out of it. This is a leaf tip as well. This one here has a little indentation that when it's pushed through, the leaf will create a center vein, where this one with the triangle does not do that. We also have several sizes of just a round tip that is really great for writing any cursive work, also scroll work. Anything that just, you know, just has a straight line to it. Then there's several variations of this one, this is a large star tip. They're used for large borders. You can also use them for icings on top of cupcakes, which is probably the most general use for these large star tips. They come in several different sizes and a couple of different designs, but they're all just kind of fun to play with. And then finally, you'll probably use this one more often, is the grass tip. As you can see, it's characterized by a bunch of little circles that create, you can push the icing out harder and make the grass longer, or make shorter bursts of pressure, and get some stippling effect. So, those are just the basics. You can also use tips for other reasons, and you can be as creative as possible. But I've used them or patterning fondant. I've also cut tiny little holes. Sometimes you don't have cutters that are small enough. If you've rolled out a piece of fondant, you can cut a hole with the tip, and it creates a lot smaller circle than any other set of cutters. Also, if you invest in buying a whole set, it's really nice, you can keep it nice and organized. It does come also with a rose nail. So, that's a basic overview of the tips.