Have you seen the Russian Icing Tips advertised? The one's that make a flower all in one pressure of the icing tube? We were really intrigued and wanted to give the a go. My youngest daughter has taken to baking and I thought this would be a fun, easy, and quick way to decorate cupcakes. I wasn't totally wrong, but I wasn't totally right either. Here are our efforts.
This is the set be bought from Amazon. It contained 7 tips for different flowers (the larger tips) and 1 tip for leaves (the smaller regular sized tip). They came in the cute red metal tin with a pamphlet showing all the different tips available. The package also included the plastic icing bags shown.
With the cupcakes made and the icing colored we were ready to give it a try. My daughter prefers canned icing to homemade so that is what we used. Take one bag, cut off a small amount of the pointed end and insert the icing tip. Don't cut too much or the tip will just push through the bag.
To fill the bag with icing, here is a tip I picked up. Place the bag with the tip into a glass, fold the top of the bag over the edge of the glass. Now your hands are free to handle the icing and you don't have to balance the bag in one hand and the icing in the other. It works really well.
Argh! Icing failure. The icing is too soft to hold the shape of the flowers. We even tried placing the icing into the freezer to firm it up. While it did work a bit better, it still wasn't optimal.
Do over!
We tried again, this time still with canned Cream Cheese icing. We colored it and added in a TON of powdered sugar to stiffen it up. It worked better but we hope we can still improve on the end results.
In the end, they taste good. We will need to practice a bit more with our icing and technique. While we didn't get the results we were hoping for, we aren't totally turned off from trying again. If you want to give it a try, here is the exact item we purchased from Amazon. This is an affiliate link.
A few suggestions:
1. The icing needs to be thick! Almost like play dough.
2. Before you lift the icing tip, give it a little giggle. This may help with the icing points that we have in our examples. And, make sure you stop squeezing before lifting up.
3. These tips are large and use a lot of icing.
