Hi, I am new to cake decorating and I love all the great advice and inspiration on this site! I am quite comfortable baking cakes and using frostings (usually those that come with a specific reicpes and of course good ol' store bought). I have really wanted to branch out and learn how to create flowers, use fondant and all that other fun stuff. I decided to take a wilton course and learn some basics. Obviously they have their own method and recipes but I recently discovered Italian & Swiss buttercreams which I love a lot better than basic or wilton buttercream. I had no idea there were so many different types of frostings/icings & buttercreams! I had a few questions about buttercream. Sorry if this has been posted & discussed already but any help would be greatly appreciated.
Can Italian/Swiss be used to create flowers and other piped designs like shown in a wilton course? Can it be made into stiff/medium/thin consistencies like a shortening one can?
Which buttercreams do you find work better and stay longer?
Do all buttercreams crust?
Any other advice???
I thank you all in advance for your help 
Sonia
I'm sorry I can't be of much help, but if you look in the cake decorating forum I think there's a post on top titled 'all you want to know about buttercream' or something similar.. that may be of some help to you.
Also~ I'm not sure if you can change the consistency of the other buttercreams, but if not, you can use them to fill/cover your cakes and use plain ol' buttercream for the flowers/decorations...
There is a post out there, I think it's called "everything you wanted to know about butter cream" in the forum.
I think there is one called butter cream tips too.
Sorry, I don't have the link for it. It's like 800 pages long (serously!) but it has just about every answer to every kind of butter cream out there I think. I spent about an hour paging through a quarter of it and learned so much from everyone here. Try doing a search on it in the forum area.
Hope that helps.
Barb
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