How to Make Buttercream Flowers

Today I'm showing you how to make some buttercream flowers. This is like the most commonly asked question I get because on my cake videos, whenever I have flowers, people want a detailed step-by-step explanation. So this video's for you. Okay, let's get started. Okay, let's talk about piping tips because besides the buttercream and the skill of your hand, they are the most important thing when you're piping buttercream flowers. We have a couple different varieties of piping tips that we'll be using today, but let's start off with my favorite ones, and these are the curved teardrop shaped. This is a 122, a little bit smaller for a 120, and this guy over here is a 61 for baby flowers. I love these tips because you get to have the petal be curved inward a bit, and they give you a lot of control. I also use these along with one other tip when I'm piping my buttercream orchids, which are really stunning and actually much easier than the rose. You can swipe or click up at the top of the screen for my how to make buttercream orchid video, which is part of my brown butter cake video. That cake is delicious, just by the by. Okay, the next variety are these straight teardrop shaped ones, and we have a 125 tip and a 104 tip that we'll be using today. These are great for doing a little bit larger of a rose shape, and the important thing is to use the pointy edge on top. The base is the curved edge. What could be better than having a smattering of leaves around your beautiful bed of flowers? The leaves will make the flowers look more realistic. They'll hide a lot of the problems you had at the bottom of the rose, especially where you cut it off from the piping nail, and just make the cake look beautiful. So I always love to include some leaves. You can have large ones with a 68 tip, or slightly smaller ones with a 349 tip. So I'm gonna add a little bit, not that much, just a bit of buttercream for our anthers and stamens. The center of the flowers are gonna be yellow, so let's add in a little bit of yellow food coloring, and then give it a nice mix. This is just a bit bright for me, so I'm gonna add in a drop of orange, just a little bit. Mix that in, and it'll tone down the yellow. So a little orange, a little yellow, and we get our nice color. Add this to your piping bag. It doesn't look like a lot, but we're using ever so little for the centers of these flowers. We're just gonna cut the very tip of the piping bag off. And you can see we're getting a nice, tiny little stamen. Now we're taking a larger batch of buttercream, and we're gonna mix in some soft pink food coloring. Soft pink is the only pink that I use when I'm making roses because it's so much more realistic. That hot supermarket bakery pink that you can get out of normal sets is just too much. Even if you use a little bit, it's still too much. When I'm adding my food coloring, I use a toothpick, and I really just get the toothpick wet with the food coloring, and then I'm gonna smear it in. You want the most control possible with your color because it's easy to add more. Taking it away means you have to add in more white. When you're making realistic flowers, it always helps to have a gradient, so you fill one half of the piping bag with one shade, the other half with another shade or even white, and then when you pipe it out, it gives it more depth and realism. Another batch, and even less food coloring now, so just a little bit. Nice and pink. Beautiful peachy blush. This is actually my favorite, but it doesn't show up on camera all the time, so you have to go a bit richer. The rest of it we'll leave white for now. We will be piping some white flowers as well, and we're gonna color a little bit of it with some matcha powder for our leaves. I'm gonna try doing a classic rose with a 127 tip for my first flower. One side of the piping bag will get filled up with the lighter shade, the other side of the piping bag with the darker shade. And a little test. Looks good. I'm taking a little bit of buttercream and folding in some more confectioner's sugar because I want it to be the base of my flower, which has to be the consistency of basically like Play-Doh. Schmear a bit of buttercream onto your work surface, pat on your square of parchment paper, and let's get started. Taking some of my thick buttercream, gonna place it on there and make a little mound out of it. Now we're ready for our petals. I'm using my 127 tip, and I'm gonna make a little spiral to start off with. Once your spiral's complete, you can start making little arcs that'll overlap. So the first arc, one, two, three, four. There we go. That's a perfectly nice flower, and when we finish, we'll be using our scissors to cut the flower off and place it onto the cake. Let's do another one. Small base. We'll use our yellow buttercream to pipe in some center detail. Once again, we'll do a spiral. A little bit looser this time. All right, perfect, and if you wanted to, you can even use a toothpick just to adjust those center stamens if they've moved around. Okay, once again, we're gonna make a little base. Using your 122 tip, closely overlap these petals, and don't be afraid to use your finger to manipulate things. You want a closed bud in the center and it gradually opening up. So the petals towards the outside, you can angle your tip out a bit more so the petals are more open and your flower looks realistic. Okay, one more glob of our play-doh-like buttercream at center, and now we're going to pipe our stamens. Okay, so for this flower at the center, we're not gonna do a spiral. We'll do some close arcs, and now we're gonna make some more petals with arcs. Overlap up and down. The piping tip really does most of the work for you. You're just along for the ride. And now for the outer petals, we're going to flare them a bit, and to do that, we're going to take our tip at more of an angle outward, and there we go. All right, to make a smaller white rose, I'm gonna start off with my mound of dense buttercream. Use a small petal tip to pipe tiny little petals. You wanna have those anthers and stamens exposed in the center, so don't cover up all the yellow. For the outer petals, again, you can angle your tip outward a bit so the rose appears more open. Don't be afraid to use your fingers. So I really hope that you give buttercream flowers a try. They're delicious and not hard to make. Also, if you fail, just eat the buttercream and no one will know. It'll be our secret. Okay, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. Thanks for watching. Hit that like button, and don't forget to subscribe.