Just like to create paintings you need sets of brushes and paints, to create your cake decorations like Guy Allan Davis, who is a pastry chef, you need to assemble your own cake decorating kit that is tailored to your needs, wants, and skills.
Depending on how serious you are about cake decorating, you could have a small plastic case or a big durable box. While you may have some of the tools already, you probably do not own some of the specialized ones. In any case, you should definitely get some tips, couplers, and flower nails. These simple tools can help you create an array of beautiful designs. You can choose from dozens of icing tips, but it is very likely that you will end up using just a few of your favorite tips over and over again. Because of that, you can start with several tips of standard sizes and expand your toolkit as you go.
You can get the tips that are made of plastic and that have nickel plating. You can wash plastic tips in the dishwasher. They are widely available, but not as durable, reliable, and precise as metal tips that you need to wash by hand. If you are just getting started, you will probably need all tips in the range from #1 to #10. A collection of ten tips will allow you to create a range of dots, strings, scripts, letters, customized messages, and so on. You also want to add to your collection some star, basket weave, leaf, and petal tips.
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You do not have to purchase all these tips individually. Instead, you can invest in a tip set that will include most if not all of the essential tips. Beginner sets may have as little as ten tips while professional sets can contain fifty or more. A typical tip costs around one dollar, so even if you decide to get twenty or thirty of them, you will hardly break the bank. When you buy your tips, also buy a tip cleaning brush. It will help you clean your tips better and remove all the frosting residue that will inevitably accumulate inside of your tips.
To be able to attach a tip to a pastry bag, you will need a coupler. Every coupler has two parts. The first one is a round plastic cone that you place inside of a pastry bag. The second part is a ring that you screw over the tip on the outside of the pastry bag. Having a number of couplers instead of one will allow you to create frostings of different colors at the same time. Couplers also come in handy when you create different designs of the same color. Instead of preparing a number of bags so that you have a bag per tip, you can use a combination of a bag and a coupler and then switch the tips, which is what experienced pastry chefs like Guy Allan Davis choose to do at times.
Guy Allan Davis 