Hi all! I'll probably be asking lots of questions over the next few weeks as I have my very first food fair coming up and I'm lost on so many aspects.

Anywho I've been watching lots of buttercream flower cupcakes tutorials (roses in both 2d tip and petal tip techniques, chrysanthemums, pansies, hydrangeas) and I'm ready to start practicing soon but I'd like to have a better idea of how much buttercream I'm going to need. I feel like the petal tip is thin but then again there's lots of layers so I'm not sure if that calls for more buttercream per cupcake than the usual piped simple swirl. In your experience do you need double the amount of buttercream for piping flowers?

If it makes a difference, I like using SMBC by http://dessertdesignlife.com/swiss-meringue-buttercream/ added a little powdered sugar to help stabilize it a bit. The recipe makes 6 cups and I think last time I covered aprox 28 cupcakes with one full recipe. I made the mistake of not jotting down the results so I can't remember exactly what I did :-\ 

I use between 20 and 25g buttercream per cupcake (95cm diameter).

For a regular sized cupcake when I make roses I would say I use about a half a cup of buttercream per cupcake, and that's being generous with the buttercream. I use American Buttercream though, not Swiss. 

Wow 1/2 cup sounds like a lot when I think about how many cupcakes I have to make lol. @flourandsun  do you think the type of buttercream that is used would make a difference as to how much goes onto each cupcake? 

You can just test out how much YOU use.  Load a pastry bag with peanut butter and pipe out a flower onto some wax paper.  When you're done scrape the flower into a glass measuring cup smooth it down and you'll know how much you're using - my guess is somewhere around 1/4 cup.

That's a good idea. Unfortunately peanut butter where I live is a different consistency but I can try to find something else that's creamier like buttercream.

Room temp butter... you can have the prettiest toast in town!

hahahaha!

since you just want it for practice, why not make a shortening and sugar icing?  Really doesn't matter how much you make since in practice you scrape it up and refill your pastry bag. Personally I just keep a tub of that cheap Wilton icing for practice.  The current tub has lasted a few months.  

I was being very generous! I always like having extra, it's too hard to pipe flowers with not enough buttercream in the bag. :) Good luck!

I'm pretty sure you gonna use way less like a quarter of a cup!!!! I literally weight out the amounts on buttercream I use for swirls - and mine are big. 25g is what I need. From experience I can tell that I need less/same amount to pipe flowers since the buttercream is not a compact swirl but piped in rose petals with space or something else but always with space where you don't have buttercream. I use mainly smbc but it doesn't make a difference.