My First Fancy Cake: A TikTok-Inspired Adventure in Piping

If you’ve ever fallen down the TikTok rabbit hole of beautifully piped cakes, you know the feeling. It starts with, “That looks easy!” and quickly turns into, “Wait, how did they do that?!” That was me this past week when I decided to attempt a four-layer cake with decorative piping. It was a rollercoaster of buttercream, messy hands, and many, so many pauses on TikTok tutorials.

The Plan (and the Panic)

I wanted to create an elegant, vintage-style cake with detailed piping, so I went into the tik tok rabbit hole and came across one video that inspired me. The Tik Tok seemed easy enough to follow. The video was created by Sweeties by mariana. The video showed what tips to use and a step by step process of each piping technique. This was the vision: 

• A shell-like border on both the top and bottom of the cake.
• Leaf-tip detailing on the sides for the vintage look.
• Closed star tip accents to create textured details right next to the shell borders.

Easy, right? I was wrong. At least at first.

The Learning Curve

TikTok tutorials make it look so effortless. It seemed like I just needed a steady hand and some soft buttercream. I had to rewatch the video a lot of times to try and wrap my head around it. My first few piping attempts looked more like a squiggly disaster than elegant design. But after some trial and error (and scraping off my first attempt), I found my rhythm.

• French Star Tip: This was my favorite part! I used it to create the shell-like border on the top and bottom edges, giving the cake that beautiful, ruffled look. It took a few tries to get even pressure for consistent shells.
• Leaf Tip: I added this to the sides. It created delicate cascading details. This was tricky at first because again, I wasn’t sure how much pressure to apply.
• Closed Star Tip: This tip added extra dimension right next to the shell piping, giving the design a more textured finish. 

I took out the cherry part and left the middle top of the cake empty. I also did not add the extra swoops under the leaf tip details because I thought it would be too much icing in my opinion. I appreciate how you can follow a tutorial but still make it your own.

The Final Result

After lots of practice, some deep breaths, and an embarrassing amount of buttercream taste tests, my cake actually turned out gorgeous! The piping wasn’t 100% perfect (yet!), but it looked elegant, detailed, and it was very delicious. That was the goal!!!

Would I do it again? Absolutely! Learning decorative piping from Tik Tok took lots of patience and lots of screentime… but once I did some trial and error, it was incredibly rewarding. I feel like Tik Tok gave me more freedom and let me follow the tutorial but take away and add things I liked with the creators ideas and my own. 

Next week, I might try adding rosettes or even experimenting with different colors again. But for now, I’ll celebrate this victory—one buttercream shell at a time.