Buttercream cake ideas
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Buttercreams fall into several categories. Some of the popular creams include meringue-based buttercreams like Italian buttercream, which is cooked with a hot sugar syrup, and Swiss buttercream, in which egg whites and sugar are melded together in a water bath- French buttercreams, which contain egg yolks- and butter- or shortening-based buttercreams. You may prefer to work with one or the other, such as Italian buttercreams for wedding cakes or shortening-based buttercream for borders and flower decorations.
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Ruffled Cake
A ruffled buttercream cake is deceptively easy to do. You will need a #104 petal tip to make the ruffles, which are essentially folded-over ribbons of buttercream squeezed out from a pastry bag. The ruffles are repeated vertically to form ruffle columns all along the sides of a cake. You can also finish the cake with flatter ruffles on the topmost ridge of the cake, forming a frilly border.
Cornelli Lace and Sotas
Cornelli lace requires a thin consistency buttercream to act in the way that royal icing does, which is generally used for more precise work like lettering and forming strings. A thin buttercream and a #1 tip allow you to pipe thin squiggly lines that do not cross, touch or overlap each other and have the look of lace from far away. The key is to form continuous squiggles without loose ends- the pastry bag should be at a 90 degree angle and you should neither scrape the cake nor flatten the icing. The same thin buttercream will help you form sotas, similar to Cornelli lace except that the lines are closely interwoven to form a kind of blanket of spaghetti, strand-like loops. Less pressure on the pastry bag will help create the meshwork of thin loops.
Fleur de Lis
Making a fleur de lis pattern using buttercream may seem daunting, but it is essentially a matter of joining several piped shells together at their ends. Using medium consistency buttercream and a #21 tip, you will be working at a 45 degree angle a short distance from the surface. The first shell establishes the fleur and tapers at the end- a reverse shell, also created at a 45 degree angle, flares to the left as one of the petals of the fleur de lis, joining the tail of the first shell. A mirror image of the petal on the right finishes the pattern.
Star Fill-ins
A technique that makes a cake look textured and complicated is the star fill-in, which uses a star tip to create clusters of stars with close serrated edges. The buttercream needs to be medium consistency, filled halfway inside a piping bag. You will use a #16 tip that is poised 1/4 inch from the surface to be piped. Exerting pressure, you will create a star, after which you will immediately release pressure and lift away. After creating a row of stars, adjust the tip so that the next set of stars interlock with the previous set, without spaces. It is important to release pressure before you lift the tip away. Also, vary the pressure to create different sized stars.
Source: www.ehow.com
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