It doesn't seem like there's anything out there that says all that must be said straightaway regarding this purchase, so it's time for another save-the-day post. Surely this kit is a best seller, and surely most of the recipients don't know how to make sense of it. The real question is: why haven't you consumers written a post like this for me? It would have saved me some time. And while I'm up here on my soap box, Wilton, why didn't you include a 1M? Everyone knows that 1M is a basic necessity (awkwardly ducks down off the box before getting mistaken for an Ateco kid.) 1M is the commonly used open star with 6 deeply grooved prongs, and 230, also conspicuously absent, is a Bismarck, which is used to fill cupcakes, eclairs, and donuts. If you just bought the Wilton 55 and settled yourself comfortably into this post with a cup of coffee, I'm sorry, but I'd recommend that you put down your mug and order those two tips before continuing. If you're feeling frivolous, throw in the giant basketweave/cake froster 789, which removes the necessity of crumb coating your cake and fills Swiss rolls before you can say "Bob's your uncle." If you just won the lottery, however, get the Wilton St. Honoré too, and make a Gateau St. Honoré because you have the time, and tell me all about it. It will cost you $1.89 for the tip and maybe the cost of pastry school.
It is generally agreed upon that there are six basic types of piping tips, but I don't know why. First of all, one of these six either encompasses two types or simply has two names: the closed star and the drop flower. Secondly, the miscellaneous category, called "specialty," includes the subcategories ruffle and basketweave. So maybe there are nine. Or eight. If you want to pay $7.29 for Wilton's laminated chart, and if you want to believe that your chart is worth more than my post, then you will believe in the number eleven. Predictably, I'm going to go with eight for prime factorization reasons among other important instincts.
These eight categories are:
Round
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 2A
Open Star
14, 16, 18, 21, 363, 32, 199, 4B
Closed Star/Drop Flower
27, 30, 54, 224, 107, 129, 131, 109, 2D
Petal
59s, 101, 102, 103, 104, 125
Leaf
349, 352, 66, 67, 68, 74, 70, 366
Ruffle
86, 100, 340, 402
Basketweave
44, 47, 2B, 150
Specialty
233 (grass/fur), 81 (crescents/petals), 83 (x's), 353 (hearts/fat leaves), 105 (textured grooves)
You read that correctly; I placed tip 150 in the basketweave category instead of Wilton's recommended petal category. It was a conscious decision; I don't agree that an evenly distributing tip like 150 belongs in the petal category. Sure, you could use 150 to make flower petals, but that brings me to my next point.
Choose any of these tips, do a quick search, and you will likely wind up with a four minute video on "Eight Ways To Use Your Piping Tip!" That's unfortunate, because for the most part, a few techniques are being repeated with different tips to create different videos, each of which imply that the tip you're thinking about is the most versatile tip in the world. Forget that. Here are some basics ideas, and your own mind will launch you safely in the right directions from here.
Large round tips, large open star tips, and large closed star tips are all used to make cupcake swirls.
Large round tips are also used to make dots, spikes, and mounds. If you squash a large dot with an offset spatula and drag it sideways, this is the beginning of the easy but effective scalloped pattern.
Small round tips can be used for small dots, which are often used in the centers of flowers, or dragged dots, which can be connected to make pearl borders, hearts, fleur-de-lis, and bead flower petals. By applying constant pressure and piping lines, small round tips can also be used for drawing (bows are common), lettering, vines, various lace patterns including the squiggly Cornelli lace, drop lines that hang off the sides of the cake, and lattices. In addition to all of these, medium round tips are usually the choice for medium sized mounds, which are the foundations of buttercream roses.
Brush embroidery, a technique in which an icing is faded into a surface using a food safe paintbrush, is usually used in conjunction with small round tips. When dots are very small and placed equidistantly in parallel diagonal lines, they are called Swiss dots. Both brush embroidery and Swiss dots are most often piped in royal icing.
Open and closed star tips are used in very similar ways. Star tips pipe stars, kisses, shells, hearts, rosettes, ruffles, and drop flowers.
Both open and closed star tips come with swirled versions, in which the grooves are slanted. Frankly, I don't believe the advantages of this design are clear. In fact, I believe they're on the market as Emperor's New Clothes. People must pretend to understand them to seem smart, and keep buying them to prove it. One more tangent, and then I promise to return to the discussion on star tips: now that both shells and drop strings have been brought to your attention, these can be combined in many ways, and some of these patterns are called plume borders, crown borders, and chandelier borders. These effects are along the ornate and vintage side.
Open star tips don't accidentally go wavy, so they're a better choice for straighter shells, rounder peaks, and crisper cupcake swirls. Open stars that have many teeth (about a dozen) are called French stars.
Closed star tips, in which the teeth are curved inwards, are more defined than open star tips, and create more intricate rosettes, wavier ruffles, and prettier drop flowers. Sometimes the centers are empty like open star tips, and sometimes they're completely closed off with a dot of metal in the middle. When they're completely closed, they're called drop flower tips, even though very nice drop flowers can be made with all closed star tips. If a closed star tip is blocked off in the center, the star or drop flower will form peaks along a central ring. If not, the star or drop flower will form a central peak just like an open star tip. In other words, drop flower tips create a little cavity for a flower centers to be piped in. As mentioned before, small round tips work nicely for this job, as does the specialty grass tip 233. When piping drop flowers, rotating about the tip's origin fans out each leg of the star into an arced petal. This is a notably useful trick.
Back when I was talking about using a large round piping tip, I never mentioned that you could make a "dollop," and this was on purpose, for dollops are stupid and ugly. Whenever I fill homemade oreos or macarons, the dollop never enters my mind, and I pipe a careful even circle like any civilized person. However, when it comes to large star tips, especially large closed star tips, the dollop combined with an upwards zigzagging motion actually creates beautiful ruffled mounds.
Large star tips are often the tips of choices for simple but attractive borders like the braid, the rope, and the spiral. The braid is just what it sounds like: a series of overlapping dashes that creates the illusion of a braid. The rope is a series of overlapping curves that creates the illusion of a two-strand twisted rope, and the spiral is a sideways swirl in which the radius remains constant. Accidental breaks in the spiral, which are inevitable, are ideally made at the bottoms of the swirls at the surface of the cake, where they are safely hidden from view.
There are a few names for common movements in the piping world. The "c," "reverse c," "s," and "swirl," which is a regular two-dimensional spiral, all describe swirling around in various directions with no overlapping.
(Assuming that a spiral is a shape in which the radius is constantly increasing or decreasing, and a swirl is a three dimensional shape in which a circle is traced, like a slinky, then it is true that a swirl is called a spiral and a spiral is called a swirl in the piping world. A cupcake swirl, then, is a three dimensional spiral.)
Anyway, when c's, reverse c's, s's, and swirls are combined so that nothing overlaps but many swirls touch, it's called scrolling. The "e" and the "figure 8" are swirly motions that overlap themselves, and they look more loopy and cursive.
The time has come to talk about reverse shells. For right handed people, these are alternating star tipped c's starting at the top of the c (counterclockwise) with c's starting at the bottom of the c (counterclockwise). The tails swirl along a horizontal line from left to right. Notice that a "c starting at the bottom" is simply the left side of a circle that starts with a "reverse c." For left handed people, these are reverse c's starting at the tops and bottoms of the c's, moving from right to left.
It is such a beautiful border that there are many variations; there is the double reverse shell, in which two adjacent shells are piped before alternating directions, or the triple reverse shell in which three adjacent shells are piped before alternating directions, and then there's the overpiped double reverse shell, in which a third shell is piped on top of the double reverse shell with each new shell appearing on the left of each double. I am confident that I've lost you, but here's an overpiped double reverse shell borders video starring one mustachioed Roland Winbeckler that will make sense of this entire paragraph.
Petal tips are used for petals and ruffles. One side is thicker to create a foundation, lifting skinny edges to curve elegantly in the air. Petal tips can be used to create nearly any flower you can think of, petal borders, and ruffle borders. Leaf tips are pretty straightforward; you can ruffle them any way you wish or not, and lift them upwards if you so choose. They just make leaves and petals that look like leaves. I think they're spectacular.
Popular piped flowers include roses, pansies, violets, carnations, poppies, tulips, and daisies. For best results, roses are usually piped onto flower nails or skewers, whereas the other flowers are sometimes piped onto flower nails and sometimes piped directly onto the desired surface. The specialty crescent piping tip 81 is used for dahlias and chrysanthemums, and leaf piping tips are used for the petals of sunflowers, asters, and poinsettias. Drop flower tips are used for hydrangeas and wisterias. But don't pay too much attention to any of this; it's likely that if you see a flower you'd like to pipe in real life, you'll know what to do.
Although most flowers are piped so that the viewer looks downwards into the flowers, there are several tutorials on how to pipe sweet peas, half carnations, tulips, rosebuds, and half roses so that the viewer sees the side of the flower instead. There is no delicate way to put this: that's simply not as cool. You don't see any of that in the opening picture of Wilton's advertisement for their set, do you?
Before we leave the world of petal and leaf tips, I should mention that you can make ruffles into arc patterns that hang off the sides of your cake like fat gaudy drop lines, and these are called garlands. And if you make garlands without the ruffle effect, but you pipe a curve without the help of gravity like a drop line, they're called swags. I should also mention that even though petal tips can make ruffles, ruffle tips make a great variety of more intricate and delicate ruffles, and these usually come off as more fabricky.
This brings us to basketweave tips. A basketweave tip is primarily used to make a basketweave, but it's also like a calligraphy pen, and it's also like an evened out petal tip, so there's no reason you can't run around this world piping swags and letters and flowers and ruffles. In a basketweave, long vertical and short horizontal lines are piped to create the illusion of a woven basket. It's a beautiful effect and a way of decorating that doesn't necessarily build up mounds and mounds of unwanted buttercream (or even worse - decorator's buttercream, which should be called shorteningcream, which is so gross that we all just pretend it's buttercream and turn a blind eye.) Most basketweave tips have one grooved side and one smooth side, but 44 and my incorrectly placed 150 are smooth on both sides.
Last, and also least, are Russian piping tips. I have not mentioned them because they weren't included in my purchase, and my interest in them remains distant, but if you start doing research about tips, you will run into these a great deal. They are rather self explanatory and have no place in my post except to show up for a comically awkward ending. They are stamps.
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