Piping Hearts with Tip #8

You may recall, I'm a big fan of piping hearts with Tip #353, which pretty much pipes hearts and nothing else. However, that tip is a bit hard to find and I think it's a good idea to know how to pipe hearts with a round tip, which you can find anywhere. I wanted to make some tiny hearts to trim the stacked cake I made in the Wilton Tall Cakes class, so here's what I came up with. First, tape a sheet of parchment paper to a cookie sheet. Then, load a pastry bag with a #8 tip (or larger or smaller, depending on your project) and a healthy dose of royal icing (this color, by the way, is Electric Pink by AmeriColor). Start each heart by piping a ball at slightly less than a perpendicular angle to the cookie sheet with the tip just above the sheet:

Once you've piped a ball, increase the angle, decrease the pressure, and pull out a tail:

Repeat the process, coming at the heart from the other side:

Keep your dusting pouch full of powdered sugar and cornstarch handy. Touch your fingers to it if need be to pinch the "tails" into a more defined heart-shape.

You might also want to tap the center of the heart so the divot between the two piped halves is less defined:

Allow the hearts to dry for a few hours. Remove them from the parchment paper either with an offset spatula or by peeling the paper away from them (or a combination of both).

Use them to decorate anything. I used them to break up all the white icing on this cake with a shot of color and shape (I piped beads of royal icing on their backs to "glue" them in place). Now if only I could figure out how to write tiny little sayings on them…

Royal Icing Chain of Hearts

This was truly an experiment; I had no idea if it would work. I wanted to attempt to make an interlocking chain of hearts made of royal icing to drape from one tier of a cake to another. I figured there must be plenty of tutorials on creating such a thing, but finding none, came up with this. First, I found a classic heart-shaped outline online and made a template consisting of a dozen of them:

I printed it out and taped it to a cookie sheet:

Then I taped a piece of parchment paper over it:

I loaded a pastry bag with pink royal icing and a #8 round tip. When I traced the hearts with the pastry bag, I kept the tip just inside the outline. On each row of three hearts I piped a full heart, a right half, and a left half. On the beginning and ending edges of the halves, I used a straight spatula to slice away the rough edges, so they would have a better chance of fitting flush together when dry:

Here's a whole sheet of piped outlines, drying. I gave them about 7 hours. 

You can tell royal icing is ready to be removed from parchment paper when it slides off easily. On some of the pieces I slid an offset spatula underneath to loosen them, and on others I gently slid my hand underneath the parchment and peeled it away from behind:

As with all royal icing projects, it's a good idea to make leftovers to allow for breakage. If the pieces break, though, they can generally be glued back together with more royal icing. Here's the first piece I endeavored to remove; when it popped successfully off the paper, I knew the others were probably ready:

I laid all of the pieces out, just to get an idea of how they'll all fit together. Bear in mind, the pattern is to lay a pair of halves in between two wholes…

…and try to get the edges of the two halves to line up pretty closely. Squeeze some royal icing in between them, and cement the edges together. Keep a dusting pouch full of a 50/50 mix of cornstarch and powdered sugar; you can touch your fingertips to it and then tap out any roughness in the royal icing before it dries:

I was worried I might be stalled at three links until the middle one dried, but I was able to sneak another set of links on to one of the side hearts:

I'm going to let the icing harden a bit before moving on to more links at this point. Next time, I'm definitely inclined to try this with alternating colors. Tomorrow I'm taking a class in making tiered cakes, so I thought this might be a nice decoration for that project. Photos to come!