Piping Bows with an Oval Tip

It's been a while since I picked up a piping bag; darn Wilton's new gum paste class! I was going to post another gum paste flower today, but decided to fool around with royal icing. I've been wanting to make some cute little bows to use in a cake border or on cupcakes, so here's what I came up with. I cut some parchment paper, then taped it to a cookie sheet:

I loaded a piping bag with royal icing. It took a while to find the right tip for what I had in mind; I fumbled around with various rose, ribbon, and star tips before settling on tip #57 by Ateco, which is an oval. I've mostly used it for writing cursive on cakes (a larger area sticks to the cake with an oval tip than with a round one). I started by piping a bunch of infinity signs, holding the tip at about a 45 degree angle to the surface.

Then I piped a couple of wavy tails:

It would be fine to stop there, but I wanted to try piping some sort of knot in the middle. Start at the base of the infinity symbol where the tails meet it, and pipe a short length up to the top:

Some of them had this unsightly peak…

…which can easily be tapped out with a finger, once you've touched it to a dusting pouch filled with a 50/50 mixture of powdered sugar and cornstarch:

I wanted to try another chunkier bow; something that might be appropriate for Hello Kitty (I recently found a Hello Kitty cookie cutter; an import, not licensed). I made a bunch of infinity signs that had rounder loops; a little more like an 8.

I piped the vertical line…

…and tapped it down into place. The bows can easily be removed from the parchment paper when they are dry after a few hours; peel the paper away from them like a sticker, and have a small spatula handy to pry them free if they're really stuck. Now that I know this idea for piping bows works, I'd better go snap up one of those cookie cutters before they get recalled!