But I am going to ask anyway!

I have been trying different icing recipes lately, mostly for cupcake decorating. I like to pipe pretty frosting swirls on my cupcakes but you can't really do that with most frostings, or at least that has been my experience specially with cream cheese frosting and the swiss meringue buttercream. I need to make a batch of maple frosting for cupcakes and I need it to be stiff enough to create rossettes on my cupcakes, how do I do that? ; guess my question is what is the key to make icing stiff enough to pipe? does it has to do with the amount of sugar on the recipe? with the amount of fats?

as I said this may be a silly question but I am horrible at balancing ingredients in cake batters and frostings. Any tips that you can give me will be greatly appreciated.

From my experience the less liquid you add or the more PS you add will make it more stiff...but I make BC with butter, PS, milk and then whatever falvoring.

I use IMBC to pipe beautiful cupcakes all the time (see my pics). I use a tip 2D.

When I make maple frosting, I use Indydebi's recipe and add some Adams maple flavoring to it. It makes beautiful swirls.

carmenid - use indydebi's buttercream recipe (here on cc) and use maple flavoring instead of the flavorings suggested. HTH