If you’re looking for fast cupcake decorating ideas, piping buttercream flowers directly onto the cupcakes is one way to make pretty cupcakes quickly. These quick video tutorials show how I made a few different styles of icing flowers directly onto the cupcakes using piping tip 104.
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Piping tip 104.
Piping tip 104 is a straight petal tip (there are also some curved ones), so it’s usually used for making flowers. You can use it for roses or for making other types of flowers with rounded petals. It’s a little on the larger side as far as the petal tips go, so the petals that it makes can be a little bigger than others.
You can also use the other straight petals tips to make smaller flowers…Those include 101, 102, and 103. I stuck with the 104 for these flowers since I wanted to see some different looks using the same tip.
Piping a cupcake with hydrangea blossom flowers.
To start piping hydrangea blossoms, the easiest way is to ring the entire outer edge of the cupcake with small petal shapes, then go back and fill in with more petals to form the flowers. You don’t need to make every flower individually, it’s enough to give the illusion that they’re all separate by piping a few fully-formed ones on the top layer.
Using one of the smaller petals tips would have been good for this because I thought the flowers were just a little bit on the large side. It worked, but if the petals had been a tiny bit smaller it would have been fine, too.
You could also do this with icing that’s different colors to add a little variation to the cupcake’s look.
Piping a cupcake with a rose.
Piping a rose is pretty easy if you start with the petals that will lie flat on the cupcake first, then go to the center to pipe the rose the normal way. By putting the outermost layers down first, you avoid having to fill in around the bottom when the rose is almost formed, which can be difficult if there’s not much room around the bottom row of petals.
You could pipe this one starting from the center and working out without doing the outer petals first, but I liked the look I got doing it this way. It also helped keep the rose attached to the cupcake as I was working from the center out because the bottom petals allowed the icing to stick to that.
Piping a carnation.
This flower is just fluffy and has lots of petals, so you can call it a carnation. It’s more of a fantasy flower, though, since it’s not meant to look like anything specific. Start on the outside and work your way to the inside, then pipe some center petals that stand up a little more than the outer ones to give it some shape.
For how to make a cake with air dry buttercream flowers, click here.
A rose with drop flowers.
This was a rose piped starting in the center, then I filled in around it with a drop flower tip.
Tip 104 daisy.
This daisy is easy to do, and you could add a center with a different icing color or a dragee if you wanted to.
For this kind of flower, hold the tip at a 45 degree angle or so, that way the icing will come out and stand up on the cupcake surface. If you hold the tip flat the petals won’t stand up.
The final cupcakes.
These would be cute to do in different colors to put on a dessert buffet. Put them in the freezer on a cookie sheet to harden up, then store in the fridge in a container that keeps them separate from each other until you display them.
The rose was the one that would probably be the most likely to being ruined since the largest petals stuck out over the edge of the cupcake. If that’s likely to happen, or if you have to travel with the cupcakes, try not to pipe the petals past the edge of the cupcake to prevent them from getting smashed.
