Icing tips

Do you want to decorate cakes, cupcakes or other pastries with airy buttercream, icing or enchanted cream? Then you probably use piping bags and icing tips. There are many different nozzles. In this blog you will find an explanation of how to use a coupler and we will show you how to use a number of nozzles, with fun examples!

Read on now!

Adapter

An adapter, also known as a coupler, is used to easily change icing tips with one piping bag. This is handy when you want to apply different tufts of the same vanilla buttercream or when you want to apply different tufts of the same colour enchanted cream on several cupcakes. In our webshop you can find adapters of different brands and of different sizes. This Wilton standard adapter is suitable for all standard sizes of Wilton nozzles, but also for nozzles of other brands with a standard size. With an adapter you can easily make beautiful cookie cakes, like with this recipe for a salted caramel number cake. In this recipe you can replace the three piping bags with different nozzles with one piping bag with adapter and then change the nozzles.

Different icing tips

There are many different nozzles, but the most common are the following.
First is the round tip, the higher the number of this nozzle the larger the diameter. These tips are ideal for creating dots, lines, letters, numbers and can be used to make baked goods like Macaroons.
Secondly, the star tips, with the variants open star and closed star, these are most often used for piping swirls and making roses on cupcakes. These icing tips can also be used for creating meringues and for decoration work, like piping stars, flowers, shells and multiple layers of "ruffles" on top of each other.
A nice recipe to try out these two nozzles is this cute Alpaca cake!

Thirdly, the petal tip, which is a nozzle with which you can easily spray petals. This allows you to spray beautiful flowers, but also drapes, bows and ruffles.
Fourth, the leaf tip, this is a tip with a V shape to spray nice leaves. Ideal for detail work on cupcakes with a floral design.
This recipe for a Botanical cake is ideal to try out different icing tips when spraying plants and leaves!
Fifth, the basketweave tips, these can be used to create beautiful (basket)weave patterns, but they can also be used to create smooth and ribbed stripes.

Sixth, the ball tip. With this decorating tip you can pipe a nice fluffy and airy ball on top of your cupcakes or cakes. The tip is also used to pipe nice tufts of whipped cream on the cake.
Seventh, the filler tube tip. As the name already says, this nozzle is used to fill pastry quickly, for example to make filled donuts. The tip of this nozzle is extra long, which allows it to go further into the pastry and spray fillings.
Finally, there are the decoration tips. These are different nozzles with a special shape. There are icing tips for grass/hair, dropflowers and more.

Getting started yourself!

Do you want to practice piping on buttercream or enchanted cream? Then make some cupcakes based on the basic cupcake recipe and start piping vanilla cupcakes with different icing tips. For this you can use this cupcake red velvet recipe as an example. With nozzle #233 you can spray grass or hair, super nice to make your own dog shaped cupcakes. With a larger round nozzle you can easily make these fun rainbow cupcakes or creepy monster cupcakes.
See also our many cupcake recipes for more inspiration and explanation how to make cupcakes with buttercream, enchanted cream or other frostings.