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The 5 Most Common Piping Tips & How To Use Them

29 May 2019

 

There are hundreds of piping tips out there, in a variety of categories such as open star, closed star, round, drop flower; the list goes on. They all have different uses and create different effects, so how do you know which piping tips you should buy when you are first starting out? 

 

To make things a little simpler we’ve picked out five best-selling tips and explained what they do below:


1M Open Star


The 1M is the most popular piping tip. It's often referred to as the Wilton 1M tip, but you can use any brand of 1M tip, such as Loyal or PME. It’s a perfectly sized star tip that is fantastic for piping rosettes on cupcakes or adding detailed borders onto your cake edges. It’s also wide enough to pipe biscuits, meringue nests, or choux pastry.


2D or 1B Closed Star

The 2D or 1B tips are other very popular star tips. Like the 1M, they can be used for piping rosettes and swirls, but will have deeper groves due to being closed stars rather than open, creating more drama!


1A Round

The 1A piping tip is a brilliant wide mouth round piping tip that can be used to pipe macarons or apply buttercream to cupcakes in large, fat round swirls.


6B French Star

A French Star tip like the 6B or 4B tip can produce fine, deeply-grooved patterns with your frosting. They are ideal for creating shells, stars, flowers, and scalloped designs.


1.5 Writing Tip

Our favourite writing tip by far is the PME Supatube Writer 1.5. It’s small enough to have great detail but large enough to pipe easily. It’s the go-to tip for icing cookies or writing on cakes.