Sandy Sheppard: Hi! I am Sandy Sheppard, a master cake decorator, and I am here today to show you how to use a couple of basic tips in decorating, same tips I am talking about a cake decorating tip. We are going to start off with this one, which is a number 22 and I am going to take my pastry bag here, which has a coupler in it and put that number 22 on the end. Then I have brought my coupler ring slide it over the tip and fasten it tightly in place. Now, I am ready to start. When I work with a large bag of icing like this, if I was to hold it and decorate it from this point, my hand would get very tired, because I really have to push a lot to get that much icing to go through the tip. So, what I do is grab it down where its closer and just twist that up so it stays, and then I am ready to work. What I first show you how to do a star and a couple of simple techniques, and then I am going to decorate this cake for us. A star is done at a 90 degree angle with the tips, slightly off the surface and its best to keep your arms off the table. I am going to squeeze the icing, stop my pressure and then lift it away and then we have got a nice star.

You can actually make a border by repeating this with the stars close together and make a border that would go around your cake. Now, as I mentioned on a previous video, there is many sizes of star tips, and I most often use a larger one like this when I am working around the base of a cake, not at the top because to me that feels too large. It depends on the size of your cake, so use one thats in appropriate size for the size of your cake.

There is another technique called a star filling method, where you would make first a row of stars and then your next row would go in between the first. So, you would work between these two and make a star that would fill in the space, and continue along working in between the stars of the previous row and you would be able to actually decorate a cake without having iced it first because the stars fill in and cover the cake completely and thus fill in your cake. You can even clip that in between things if you want.