Pipe Dreams: Wilton #233 on a Carrot Ginger Cake
Non-Sequential Pipe Dreams
After last week’s adventures with a straight tip I decided to jump WAY up in complexity to something I really feel like I need to master: the grass tip.
The grass tip from Wilton is the “fur” tip. It’s the tip that, if mastered, can make any cake into a muppet. It’s not only useful for short fur, but can also simulate long hair or nests. It really has a lot of possibilities.
The piping started all right, but let’s just say that by the end I was holding a clogged piping bag in one hand, a hot dish cloth in another, wiping sugar sweats from my forehead like I was performing surgery, regularly pounding on the counter in frustation, and taking multiple breaks to google phrases such as “GRASS TIP CLOG SPURT WHY?!”
This one was a journey.
233 Opportunities to Clog
The grass tip pipe, as you can see above, is basically a ravaged piece of scrap metal sent back from the future to torment me. It’s a scarred and twisted, jagged bit of hardware designed to foment rage.
The tip, when it’s working, exudes many thin streams of frosting or icing that come out like a Play Doh spaghetti factory, or… I guess… an actual pasta extruder.
A stroll through Instagram or Youtube will show you how easy it is to use.
A stroll through the comments sections of any other these, a journey I did not take before loading up my piping bag, will show you these are all lies. Social media is a lie: ground-breaking.
Like my cake designed with Wilton #5, I should have tempered my expectations for this cake.
But I didn’t want to.
Does any adult?
I know it’s a silly thing to expect perfection or ease in something I’ve never done before, but despite constantly patting myself on the back for trying new things and being #brave enough to put these failures on the interwebs, it’s still disappointing when things don’t work out. It’s hard not to get angry when my plans don’t bear the fruit I expect. It’s disheartening and disproportiantely exhausting for plans to fizzle in such a concrete way. It sucks to sketch out an idea and to schedule an entire day around making something only to have it clop, droop, and ooze.
Then again…
I guess there’s something nice about the collapse of your dreams happening so quickly. There is no lingering expectation when it comes to executing these cakes and their associated pipe dreams. When the cakes fail, they fail right away. I could tell after the first row of frosting’ed fur that this was going to be a journey: a short journey with a lot of swearing that ended with me sucking the last of the frosting from the piping bag as I glared at the cake.
But at least I knew it failed.
It wasn’t sending a resume into the void.
It wasn’t putting your work out into the world and getting no feedback. It wasn’t tirelessly working at something only to have the universe not even deign to acknowledge you with a rejection letter. It wasn’t a form letter auto-generated after months of waiting for a response, giving you no feedback and no indication if the work you’d put in for the last year had even warranted anything beyond the rejector glancing at your cover letter for two seconds.
This clogged, gloopy monster I created at least had the decency to stumble out of the gate. It’s a bit of sugary closure in a world whose neglect is much crueler than its rejection.
So I guess, despite my outsized rage at this cake, it’s worth it to keep following these pipe dreams. It’s worth it to keep drawing my little sketches and manipulating these tips, because one day I’m going to realize I’ve improved. One day I’ll pick up a new pipe and some of the lessons I’ve learned will transfer. I’ll watch as my vision comes to fruition in sinuous ribbons of pastel confection. I’ll get what feels like instant gratification, but what will actually be the result of hundreds of hours of failure, a.k.a. learning.
What a lovely little baker I’ll make.
My cakes? They’ll look divine.
Things will work out according to my ultimate design.
Soon I’ll have that little mermaid and the ocean will be mine.
Any day now.
Lessons with #233
That is an extreme close-up.
Consistency
After researching what went wrong, it appears again that I’ve got to be more intentional about the type of frosting I’m using and the tip I’m planning on using.
This Carrot Cake is covered with a lightly gingered Cream Cheese Frosting, and that was NOT the right frosting to use.
You would think, looking at all the myriad, jagged holes of 233, that you would want a relatively slack frosting to move through those holes. You would be wrong.
Apparently, the best frosting to use for the grass tip is a stiff buttercream. If you want to achieve the perky, stiff fur of your #cakestagram dreams, you need a frosting so thick you’ll have to explain your chronic wrist pain to an orthopedic surgeon.
I’ll have to try this next time… although I don’t particularly care for the taste of the stiffer buttercreams, so I may be looking at an ermine or Swiss buttercream crumb coat and an American buttercream just for the decoration. Uff. That thought already makes me want to take a nap.
Clogging
As I’ve peppered throughout this post, clogging was the main problem with this tip.
If you look at the cake, it won’t take long to see the glistening bursts of this cake’s clogs. There’s a particularly juicy globule oozing beneath its eye as well as a heavy pustule practically seeping down its right cheek. Yum!
The major cause of clogging was the slack frosting. I’m not exactly sure how a stiffer frosting makes it easier to squeeze through these small holes, but I’ve definitely got to try something different.
Halfway through the cake I finally googled my issues and began wiping the tip with a hot washcloth after every third or fourth squeeze. Seriously. It had to happen that often to deal with clogs. Even though the dishcloth cleared the blockage, the idea of having to stop and wipe the frosting this often is unacceptable. Maybe that’s the kind of dedication it takes to be a cake-fluencer.
I’ll pass.
Distance and Tension
When the pipe was working, there was still a lot of learning needed about how long to pull the tip and how much pressure to apply to get the right length of the fur. I could see this being a fun technique to master, which is why the clogs were so frustrating.
To pipe “fur” you have to start really close to the cake, squeeze slowly, pull gently away at a perpendicular angle, stop squeezing, and then pull the bag away from the cake firmly enough to break the connection but gently enough not to break the strands of frosting. It’s really quite a trick, and when it works, you do feel like a witch. Unfortunately, most of my strands just made me feel like a virgin that can’t drive.
Maybe Next Time…
Next time I’ll use a stiffer buttercream, at least for the finish.
Next time I’ll add a lot more ginger to the cream cheese frosting to give it more bite.
Next time I’ll have a washcloth handy and pump-up music playing.
Next time I might also have a drink at hand.
This all being said… he was still pretty cute, and very tasty.
Carrot Cake with Ginger Cream Cheese Frosting
I’ve had, and made a lot of Carrot Cake in my day. Carrot Cake was my mom’s favorite cake for a long time.
Carrot Cake is a spectacular beginner cake because all of its vegetables and oils make it VERY difficult to overbake. It’s a pretty easy cake to mix up and even if you mess up some of the harder parts of making a cake (creaming, reverse creaming, whipping egg whites, folding without knocking out air, etc.), Carrot Cake’s density forgives a lot of mistakes.
Cake: Carrot Cake from Flour.
Cream Cheese Frosting: Also from Flour. I added 2 tsps powdered ginger to the batch, but could barely notice it. I might add 1.5 TBSP next time and see if I can be on just this side of the line between spicy and inedible.
Eye: Modeling chocolate and candied ginger.
