Declan O'Farrell 
To pipe a buttercream rose you pipe a firm cone of stiff buttercream onto a flower nail, build a tight spiral center bud, then add two or three staggered rows of overlapping petals. You rotate the nail with one hand while squeezing the bag with the other, tilting the petal tip further outward with each … Read more
To flood cookies with royal icing, pipe a thin border around a fully cooled cookie, then fill the inside with thinner flood-consistency icing and let it self-level. If a line you drag through the icing melts back to smooth in 10 to 15 seconds, the consistency is right for flooding. Give the flood 30 minutes … Read more
Buttercream softens at about 75°F (24°C), piped details droop above 82°F (28°C), and the frosting melts outright near 90°F (32°C). So learning how to keep buttercream from melting in hot weather comes down to two levers: the fat you build the frosting with, and how cold you keep the finished cake. Swap half or all … Read more
Royal icing is a hard-setting cookie icing made from confectioners’ sugar, meringue powder or egg whites, and a small splash of water and vanilla. Mix them until smooth and thick, and you get a paste that dries to a brittle, edible shell — which is the only reason it holds piped borders, flat flood fills … Read more
Smooth buttercream comes down to two things: getting the air and lumps out of the frosting in the bowl, then sealing the cake with a thin chilled crumb coat before you run a warm metal bench scraper over it while the turntable spins. That is the whole method, and the rest of this guide is … Read more
A frosting dam is a ring of stiff frosting piped around the edge of a cake layer before the filling goes in, and it acts as a wall that stops soft filling from squeezing out the sides. To make a dam of frosting to hold filling, pipe the ring about half an inch inside the … Read more