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Piped Lace and Crochet Buttercream Flowers
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Sep 6, 2024
In this cake decorating tutorial I use two different cakes to show how to outline and pipe flowers onto buttercream cakes with slightly different techniques, using just a piping bag with a small round tip, some cookie cutters (or parchment paper with a toothpick), and an offset spatula and/or paintbrush. I used my 4 Minute Buttercream Frosting to frost and decorate these cakes and you can watch the tutorial and get the recipe here: https://youtu.be/MFKfXbnU1Lw For more creative ways to use cookie cutters, watch my tutorial on 6 Ways To Decorate Cakes With Cookie Cutters: https://youtu.be/veE_vaMZ5C0 SUBSCRIBE to my channel for new cake decorating tutorials every week!
View Video Transcript
0:00
Hi, I'm Emily of British Girl Bakes and I'm going to show you how to pipe buttercream flowers that look like lace or crochet
0:08
For both of these techniques, you'll need a piping bag of buttercream fitted with a small round tip
0:13
and you can choose how small based on how fine you want the details of the flowers to be
0:18
You'll also need some flour cookie cutters and a frosted cake that's been chilled in the fridge for about an hour
0:25
Start by pressing your cookie cutters into the frosting on the cake, which will give you a
0:29
designed to trace over with your buttercream in the next step. I'll talk about this more in a minute
0:36
Next, pipe buttercream over the outline of the flower. You can do this with smooth lines by
0:41
sweeping your bag slowly along the lines, or you can wiggle the bag up and down slightly to create
0:47
the impression of stitching or crochet. You can stick to the sides of the cake or pipe onto
0:53
the top as well. After doing the outline of the flower, you can add details or
1:00
pipe patterns to fill it in, and here I'm piping on the outline of five petals and then
1:05
covering the petals with wavy lines. You can press on the entire design with cookie
1:10
cutters and then pipe it all, or do it in stages, pressing one cookie cutter and then piping over
1:17
the outline, and then pressing the next one. It's easiest to do all of this when the
1:23
cake is cold for two reasons. Firstly, the lines will be cleaner because when you remove the
1:28
the cookie cutters you won't drag sticky buttercream with you and when you pipe if you push
1:33
your piping bag too far into the frosting you won drag that color with you as you continue to pipe because the frosting will have set so it won come off on the cake and blend with the colour you piping Secondly if the frosting is cold and hard you can hold the cutters against the cake and move them around without damaging the frosting before you push them into the frosting
1:54
And if you accidentally knock the cake with a finger while you're piping, you won't indent the frosting
2:00
I'm finishing this cake by freehanding a few leaf shapes. shapes and filling them in with wavy lines and dots. And then for this
2:12
chrysanthemum I'm not happy with the smoothness of the outline so I'm piping
2:16
dots around the outer edge of the outline to add some texture and then since
2:20
the flower looks quite empty compared to the other flowers on the cake I'm adding
2:25
some horizontal lines within each petal which I think makes this design look a
2:29
lot like crochet. This is a really fun technique because you can make it up as you go
2:34
along, adding details and letting it evolve until you're happy with the design, and
2:39
typically it will be nothing like what you originally planned on doing. A few more
2:46
leaf details, some swirls with dots, and I like how this looks with just a
2:55
section of the cake covered in piping so that the design is really eye-catching
3:04
For this next cake, my design will be more like lace than crochet, by changing the technique slightly
3:13
Just as with the previous cake I frosting my cake with my four minute buttercream and I put the link for that tutorial in the top of the screen and in the description below this video I chilling the cake for about an hour in the fridge and meanwhile I choosing my cookie cutters and preparing my buttercream for piping
3:31
These are colours left over from another cake, and I'm blending them together slightly, but not completely
3:38
so that my design will have a few different colours incorporated in it, and then spooning this into a piping bag fitted with a small
3:45
round tip. When my cake is cold and the frosting is hard, I'm pressing the cookie
3:59
cutters into it, on the sides and also on top. And then I'm starting on the top with my
4:05
piping bag to pipe over the outline of the flowers, using the same motion of wiggling my wrists
4:10
slightly like I did on the previous cake, so that the buttercream looks like stitching, as if my
4:15
flowers have been crocheted onto the cake. For smaller flowers, I'm outlining them with a
4:21
steady piping motion, without wiggling my wrist, because there isn't much space for that on
4:27
these little outlines. Here's where the technique varies from the previous cake. I'm using
4:33
my offset spatula to gently smudge the outline inwards, smoothing the buttercream against
4:38
the frosting on the cake to soften the outline. This makes them look a bit more like lace from a distance
4:45
For the smaller flowers, I'm using a small ball tool because my offset spatula is too big to fit inside the petals
4:53
I placing a little gold sprinkle into the centre of each of the small flowers and for the big flower I piping on another small flower not using a cookie cutter but you could do that to give yourself an outline to trace over and then smudging that and placing a cluster of three sprinkles in the middle
5:13
I'm doing the same for the sides, except I'm experimenting by smudging the outlines of the smaller
5:18
flowers with a paintbrush instead of a small ball tool, and I prefer the paintbrush
5:22
because it flattens the buttercream more than the ball tool does, which matches the big flowers better
5:29
As you can see, the blended colours in my piping bag aren't really showing up in my design
5:34
So if you want to use different colours, I recommend spooning them one by one into your piping bag
5:39
instead of stirring them together in a ball first, so that they're more distinct
5:44
Or you can use a few different piping bags with a different colour of buttercream in each one
5:48
and switch back and forth between flowers. If you don't have flower cookie cutters, you can draw or trace flowers onto parchment paper
5:56
and cut them out and press them into the chilled frosting on your cake, tracing around the edges with a toothpick to give yourself a guideline to pipe over
6:06
If you're looking for more ways to use your cookie cutters, I have a tutorial on six ways to use cookie cutters to decorate cakes
6:12
and you can watch it by clicking on the link in the top of the screen, or I've put the link in the description below this video
6:20
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that you learnt something new
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If you use any of the techniques, please tag British Girl Bakes on your photos on social media so I can see your creations
#Flowers