RED: Parmesan Moussen - soooooo good!

Oh, yes!! Sounds great. It reminds me that I used to serve olive oil with

Coarse pepper and parmesan also that was a great dipping with a baguette

 
Screaming to me: top a baked potato, toss to coat veggies, toss with basil and . . .

fettucine, use a dab to finish a steak or cutlet/chop, Use on hot biscuits (omg--and a dab of honey; for some reason I am starting to drool).

How's about tossing it with hot rice and finely chopped spinach>

Eat it from a spoon--savory spoon candy.

Thank you for the recipe!

 
I've been meaning to...

buy a piping set for my daughter who is into baking. What would you recommend for bags/tips? And yes I am going to try this recipe.

 
I disgust myself (and please rebuke me) to say, disposable bags. 2 star tips and one straight tip.

Maybe a flat-tip, depending on how many you want to offer.

We are far too disposable now. I have an old plasticized-canvas bag but these new soft and responsive plastic bags that go into the garbage after, are too tempting.

smack me

 
I saw those. (no rebuke)

Wasn't sure about any of it just going by stars on amazon but those have become less dependable. Better to get trusted opinions.

 
Visit to mom = very iffy WiFi Paul, I wrote up my favorite ATECO (both tips and bags) and

Then promptly lost it cause it ain't here.

Anyway, I much prefer ATECO to WILTON, whose disposable AND reuseable bags are simply not 100% dependable. The LAST thing you need when you're piping a border and have steady tension on the bag is for the seam to tear and lose pressure, not to mention getting icing all over your hands.

Suggestion: I'd have her start with plastic for the ease and because Royal Icing can't get grease on it and if a reusable bag had buttercream in it, there might be issues.

I prefer ATECO tips, but they are a slightly different size ((tiny, tiny change) than Wilton which means the couplers are not interchangeable. The ATECO will fit on the Wilton coupler, but it will be a tad wobbly (and that is annoying if you're concentrating on a border.

I don't like icing roses and leaves, so I rarely use those tips. I do like stars and shells for borders and use a lot of plain ones for lettering and Royal Icing. Definitely get a coupler because that lets her change tips easily.

For practice: see if a local bakery will sell you a pound of vanilla buttercream. That way the consistency will be perfect and won't throw a wrench in her practice by running into a blob of unblended butter or say, a raspberry seed because some idiot thought "hey, wouldn't it be tasty if I add a couple of TBLs of raspberry jam to the icing?" and then the damn seeds get stuck in the tip. Pipe on a Silpat, piece of parchment or the back of a cookie sheet. Since it's just practice, the icing can be scrapped back off and reused.

Practice both with buttercream and Royal icing. Although they look similar, the consistency is just different enough that the piping tension needs to be adjusted. Thin Royal Icing with a small tip is much easier to create letters and do fine detail work than buttercream.

 
{continued because I don't want to lose what I've written}

Like calligraphy, practice will make things easier. Draw line and large circles on a piece of parchment, flip over and practice runs. Scrap off and reuse icing. For buttercream practice you can buy 8" (ex) styrofoam round cakes that bakeries use for display. Cover with a thin layer of grout (yes, grout). It will get hard, so then practice icing and scrap off. Move on to a rotating cake stand.

You can do the same thing with Royal Icing, but actually ice the entire styrofoam with thin Royal Icing and let it dry. It will get rock hard and sealed and then you can practice on that, scrapping off the icing as needed.

Watch You-Tubes for various tips because some are held at 45 degrees and some are totally vertical. You need to have the correct angle to get the expected result from the tip.

Eastern Europeans have come up with gorgeous tips that make multicolored flowers (you can smear multicolored icings in the same bag --OR--put individual colors in separate bags, then put all of those in one big bag with a large tip and when squeezed, all the colors will come out. But that's getting a bit advanced. Ah no...that's pretty advanced.

 
thank you

I will specifically look for ATECO. What does it mean when it says to use the tip without a coupler?

 
Take a conical plastic bag, slip a nozzle in, nip off the bottom to expose the opening in the tip &

then you pipe with the bag, However, say you started piping with a shell tip and decide you want to use a star tip, you can't swap tips with the same bag without digging through all that icing in the bag. Messy messy. You would need a bag for EACH tip. And if you want to use two or three different colors, you would need three bags with 3 of the same tip.

Enter "couplers" stage right. Slip the base part of the coupler into the bag first, place the star tip over the coupler base, screw the coupler ring on to hold the tip in place, fill with icing and start piping.

Now, to swap tips to a shell tip, just unscrew the ring holding it onto the base, pull off first tip (star), add second tip (shell), put ring back on and tighten it. Continue piping! No mess, no fuss.

To swap to a different color icing if you only have one star tip, remove it from one bag, rinse to remove icing color and then use with second bag of colored icing that has the coupler on it.

 
I like disposable bags because I can see through them, but I use the plastic wrap trick

Normally I wash my disposable bags, but if I’m feeling really lazy or want to do multiple colors inside one bag without striping the bag because that’s messy, I use the plastic wrap trick:

Put a blob of your icing on a sheet of plastic wrap, roll it up as if you were rolling it into a log, don’t spread icing to the ends, now that it’s rolled up grab Both ends of the plastic wrap lift it in the air can spin it around ( in the same way as if you were going to snap a towel at someone). What you are left with is a hotdog size piece of icing in the middle with very tightly twisted ends. Then you simply drop that inside of your icing bag, or more than one if you have multiple colors, feed the one end of Twisted plastic wrap through the opening for your Piping tip and ta-da. A mess free piping bag filled with the cylinder of icing that you can later just pull out and throw away. It also helps with blowback of icing out the wrong side of the Bag when you are using it. Because now it has the twisted end of the plastic wrap and you can fold down your piping bag and clip it with the binder clip or rubber band.

It’s still not zero waste, but it lets me easily use piping bags with almost 0 cleanup and less guilt/$ than throwing away a disposable bag.

 
Tips I use most often are: Star, flat petal, round...

A small round for outlining cookies, a larger one for flooding cookies, a pedal tip because I often like to make roses or different types of flowers on top of cupcakes, a larger round to make pearls on cakes Or a line of pearls, And several sizes of star tips — one of them I have is huge for piping big globs of whip cream on top of cheesecakes or the like.

I have several others, but those are the ones that I use most often.

 
I like the tips given in this royal icing recipe

I’d like the fact that she makes it really thick at first and then you work backwards from that depending on what consistency you need at the time.

I like the fact that she uses a spray water bottle to both clean the sides of the mixer instead of scraping, and I like that she uses the spray water bottle when she is thinning out the recipe because it’s so easy to add too much water and then you are back-and-forth trying to get it to the right consistency.

Also, I agree with her theory of adding a lot of flavoring to royal icing because the fact of the matter is I don’t really like royal icing, but you are stuck with it if you wanna do certain things and I think flavoring the icing well makes a big difference. I just made a batch of this icing yesterday for cookies and like it more than most.

www.sweetsugarbelle.com/2011/04/royal-icing-101-or-all-roads-lead-to-rome/

 
This is BY FAR my favorite Swiss meringue buttercream recipe, with lots of tips included

Though I will say to cool off my SMB, I have found nothing better than to take my KitchenAid bowl and set it on top of a frozen cylinder from my ice cream maker. I have a 5 quart tilt head mixer and other than doing that I think I could beat it for hours and it still wouldn’t cool off enough to start adding the butter.

sweetapolita.com/2011/04/swiss-meringue-buttercream-demystified/

 
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