I got some old Wilton cake yearbooks from the 70’s, and this cake was inspired by one that was from 1972. It was originally a heart-shaped cake but I made it round, and I added some updated cake decorating designs to make it into a rococo-style piped buttercream cake for today. A cake decorating beginner would be able to pull this one off with a little piping practice!
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Piping tips to use.
For this cake design I used piping tips number 3 (round), 16 and 18 (star tips), 61 (petal tip), and 69 (leaf tip). See them on Amazon here (#ad)
I also used air dry buttercream to make the little flowers that I put on the top and sides, (you can get the recipe here).
I used Americolor food coloring for the icing (see it on Amazon #ad), including pink and green colors.
Piping the top border.
The outer top border was done with piping tip 18, which is a small shell border. I did one layer in pink with a basic snail trail going around the outside to start the top decoration.
This was a basic piped snail trail shell border, where you hold the piping bag at about a 45-degree angle. Squeeze the bag to start the rounder part of the shape, pull the bag to the side and stop squeezing as you move it, then taper off the shape to create the shell shape. Pipe the next shell shape covering the end of the last one, to create a little trail of shells that connect to each other.
I added a ruffle-style border with tip 61, which is a curved petal tip. That was a long strip with a few smaller ruffles at the end of each longer part. That was piped on top of the shell border and it was also pink.
This one was piped with the thinner part of the piping tip at the top, and holding the piping bag at about a 45-degree angle as I piped it. Move the strip the length of the swag as you squeeze the piping bag, then do a back-and-forth motion to make the little ruffle between the longer pieces.
Pipe the bottom border and flowers.
For the bottom border, I used the tip number 18 again and held the piping bag 90 degrees to the cake, then squeezed out a little dot of icing to create a little star. I moved along the bottom edge of the cake to create the entire bottom border.
After that, I moved to the top of the cake and added a blob of pink icing to make a little mound to attach the air-dry flowers to. I piped green leaves on the edges of that mound using piping tip 69, then I added the flowers.
I decided that the mound of icing wasn’t big enough, so I added more leaves and more flowers to make it wider.
I added the same kind of leaves and flowers to the side of the cake in two spots to decorate the bottom border.
Click here to see a purple version of these retro-looking piped buttercream cakes.
Add the swags.
I marked four even spaces around the top of the cake, then piped a swirling rope-type swag on the sides of the cake using pink icing and piping tip number 18.
This was just eyeballing the swags and where they should go, but you can mark the place where you should be piping them using a dowel to draw on the cake if you want to be more exact about it.
I added a little shell and swirl at the top of each spot where the swags touched each other, but I could have added a flower or a cluster of flowers there instead. This kind of thing is totally up to you, so decide what looks good to you as you go.
Add a contrasting color.
I added a green accent color to the bottom border using piping tip number 3, then I added a double layer of another shell border with piping tip number 16 to the top.
The bottom number 3 tip was just piped in a straight line that looped under the dotted shells, to give it some contrast. The first green border on the top was a regular snail trail shell border like the first pink shell border. The second shell border was a swirling rope pattern like the swags on the side of the cake.
I probably would only have done a single green border on the top, but the first part of the first green one was a little wonky, so I did the second one to cover it up a little.
The good thing about this type of cake is that they’re so elaborate, you can add a little more if you need to, and it will look like you meant to do it!
Full video walkthrough.
This video shows the full walkthrough of piping the cake in real time, with a few things cut out.
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