Nifty Sweets and other treats

My sister asked me about what tips to buy and what kind of bags I would recomend. In my opinion all you need is in the top pic, its all i use. The bottom pic is everything I rarely/never use.

I have a set of large tips and a set of small tips. I only use 4 of my large tips regularly the big star tip is great for quick cupcakes and meringues and the other 3 are jsut plain round tips 8mm,10mm and 12mm . I use the plain tips for filling tartlet shells, piping out pate a choux or piping out lady fingers.

For the small tips I know you can buy like a wilton everything you can ever need kit with 100 tips but they just take up space.  All I really use are a nice star tip for borders (you dont want it to be a really closed star because they get clogged really easily) a rose tip, a few small plain round ones, a leaf tip and maybe a grass tip. Depending on how you decorate you can buy other specialty tips but i find these tips do enough multipurpose work that make all the fancy ones kinda redundant. 

As far as piping bags go I use the largest available disposable bags. It is nice to have smaller ones available but if you are doing an entire cake you really dont want to be filling up your bag every 2 seconds. Also I recommend having lots of couplers (white things to screw small tips on and off)So you dont have to empty a bag to change one tip. I think the bag size i use is 20” long sounds really big but its an incredibly handy size.

I dont use reusable piping bags for 2 reasons:

1. At work I woud need like 30 to keep up with how many bags i need and i would be forever washing them.

2. They start to smell funky if you dont wash and dry them carefully and even then they can retain the smell of flavors and impart that flavor to your next batch of icing… they aren’t the most sanitary things.

If you are worried about the waste biodegradable piping bags are available from some brands.

Elf Hats! I got the idea from Martha Stewarts mini peppermint-meringue cups with ganache. But I figured they could be much cuter. So i piped peppermint flavored meringues into kisses and dried them out starting at a high temperature and then lowering it to help create cavities inside them. Then I made holes in the bottoms and piped in dark chocolate ganache. To seal them up I dipped the bottoms in white chocolate and rolled them in white sprinkles for the fur trim. And voila beautiful peppermint chocolate elf hats a great gluten free option as well :)

Ice skaters