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When it comes to stocking your cake decorating kit, you have dozens of icing tips to choose from. Most likely, however, you'll use only a handful of tips over and over again in your cake decorating escapades. Because of that, you can start off with a simple collection of some standard sizes.
 | Work with nickel-plated tips, which should be washed by hand. Plastic tips are widely available — and usually you can run them through a dishwasher for easy cleanup — but they aren't as reliable as metal tips in design or execution. |
A collection of round tips in a variety of sizes will serve you well; when you're just getting started, you'll repeatedly call on round tips #1 through #10. These tips are appropriate for a range of techniques that are both simple and stunning and include piping dots and strings, scripting, forming block letters, and writing messages.
You should also gather the following more-specialized tips:
- Star tips, such as #16, #18, #21, and #32
- Basket weave tip, such as #48
- Leaf tips, such as #67 and #352
- Petal tips, such as #102, #103, #104, and #125
Rather than purchase individual tips, many people opt for tip sets, which include many of these essential tips. Sets range from student sets that have fewer than 10 tips to professional ones that boast more than 50 tips. Standard tips run less than $1 each, so if you start out with a small tip set, you certainly can keep adding on at a relatively low cost.
| When you purchase your tips, make sure to buy a tip-cleaning brush, too. A very worthy and very inexpensive investment, the tip-cleaning brush helps you get deep into pointed tips to remove any frosting residue that running water (or a wadded-up, damp paper towel) just can't get! |
Regardless of whether you buy individual icing tips or a set, take the opportunity as soon as possible to test every tip, practicing with each one to see its particular design and to start thinking about how you can integrate each one into your cake decorating. As you play around, remember that some tips can give more than one effect: As you pipe, turn the tips over on different sides to maximize the frosting effects.
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