Frosting your cakes and cupcakes never fails to make them more appealing. Besides adding another layer of flavour and texture, it also helps to elevate your baked goods’ appearance.
However, cake decorating is much more than smearing a layer of frosting onto your cakes. Like working on a painting, cake decorating is an art; you can accentuate the aesthetics by using different tools, colours, and techniques.
Besides adding colour, a great and simple way to add variety to the look of your cakes is by using different piping tips. Piping tips help to add intricate details to your cakes, and make them uniquely yours.
There are a ton of different types of piping tips out there, each with their own serial code, shape, and number. These piping tips when used, will give you a wide range of frosting designs.
If it’s your first time frosting a cake and venturing into the world of piping tips, you might face some difficulty visualising how the frosting will look like just from the shape of the tips itself.
This piping tip guide will bring you through the 10 piping tips you can start with, their respective Wilton codes, and how and when you can use them!
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Is a large, round tip for making simple rounded swirls or drop-shaped buttercream on cupcakes. It can also help you to pipe frosting evenly between cake layers.
Use this piping tip to add large, prominent dots to your cake borders to make your cakes look even more appealing.
Hold the piping bag straight up and swirl continuously to get classic cupcake swirls. Hold it at an angle, and you can create shell-shaped decorations!
This large open star tip can also be used to add “gems"—the tiny star-like shapes that are typically used to pipe out meringue drops and decorate mini cupcakes.
Image credit: Wilton
The tighter ridges on this closed star tip create a more defined structure than open star tips.
This characteristic makes closed star tips great for piping rosettes, flowers, and making swirls. You can also create pretty, detailed ruffles using this tip!
Our Red Velvet Christmas baking kit comes with piping bags and a closed star tip that you can use to frost the tops and sides of the cake! Follow the tutorial video to model our frosting design, or get creative and make flowers, swirls, ruffles and more!
This large petal tip is great for creating frills, ruffled borders, and swags. It’s also perfect for piping out flower petals on top of your cakes and cupcakes!
To create delicate ruffles and petals with a defined structure, make sure the wider end is the closest to your cake, and the thinner end faces upwards.
Image credit: Wilton
This small, round tip is perfect for making intricate designs.
Use it to pipe dots, outlines, and rounded swirls. Making letterings using this piping tip takes some practice, but it’s surely worth your effort!
Make simple but impressive leaf-shaped details with this piping tip.
With its small-notched tip, you can quickly add ruffled leaves to your rosettes or buttercream flowers.
Make various types of leaves by holding this tip at different angles, and find out what works best for you.
This small petal tip is perfect for making tiny flowers and fine details.
Create individual little petals and arrange them into flowers, or use it to add small ruffles around your cake!
The finely cut ridges of this piping tip will give your designs excellent details.
Image credit: Walmart
Give your cakes an exciting texture using this basketweave tip.
It could be jaggedy on one or both sides, and practising how to use this piping tip is not too challenging.
Just try making them evenly spaced, and you can turn anything into beautiful baskets!
Besides grass, you can use a grass-shaped piping tip to make wreaths and pine trees, perfect for the Christmas season!
Simply pipe, stop squeezing, pull away, and repeat. To give it a more natural look, pipe the grass shape slightly to the sides instead of straight up.
Image credit: Wilton
With this piping tip set, you can step up your cake decorating game with just one squeeze! Experiment with the different patterns to create various flowers, succulents, and more.
Itching to exercise your cake decoration skills but don't want the hassles of finding a good recipe, purchasing and weighing all the different ingredients, and sourcing for all the tools required?
Try our Red Velvet Semi-Naked Cake baking kit, available for pre-order now.
Each baking kit is based on a Bakestarters' original, tried-and-tested recipe, with detailed instructions for you to create your own layered cake from scratch.
In each kit you'll find all the ingredients required to make the cake from scratch, in the amounts required so there's no mess or weighing involved.
The kit also includes cold ingredients such as butter and cream cheese, along with extra cake decorating essentials such as piping bags and a star piping tip!
The Red Velvet Semi-Naked Cake baking kit is currently available for a limited time only via pre-order. Deliveries begin 17th November.
Piping tips are certainly a go-to in cake decorating. Your collection of piping tips will surely expand along the way, but these ten are great to start with! Practice cake decorating using your favourite piping tips, and you’ll be a pro in no time.
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