Oriental Stringwork Tutorial by Dawn Parrott

Mastering stringwork takes years of practice, especially when it involves turning your cake upside down! Cake Central Instructor, Dawn Parrott has a few instructions for piping Oriental Stringwork to help on your journey to perfecting this challenging and highly desirable decorative technique.

Tools and Materials:

Piping bag, 12-inch

Piping tip, #0, 00, and 2

Corsage pins

Drinking glass

Turntable

Royal icing

Paper template

Step 1: Mark your cake.

The most important thing with almost all stringwork is to take the time to prepare the cake correctly.  Here you see a template being secured to the top of the cake to ensure that the cake is marked evenly.  I can’t stress the importance of good ground work.  If you don’t take your time here, the whole technique will be uneven and obvious.

Step 2: Using a number 2 tip, pipe “spacer” dots.

Notice that they are evenly spaced!!  Here all the groundwork has been done and we can start piping our gravity defying strings.

Step 3:  Turn the cake upside down.

What is the glass for, right?  Well, here is your answer, to pipe oriental you need to turn the cake upside down.  I found a glass works great, as you need something smaller than your cake so that you have room for your fingers to hold the cake as you turn it back upside right.  Now we start piping with a 0 or 00 tip!  You will pipe a drop string every other dot.   You can do either a single layer or double.  If you do a double layer, you will pipe one shorter than the other.

Step 4: Turn the cake back right side up

Ok, now our upside down piping is done, you can see it here standing up against gravity!  Pretty, right?  Now repeat the same process with the cake sitting upside right.  Now, what do we do with the dots we skipped you ask, you pipe more strings!  The second dots will have slightly shorter strings.  This helps to create visual interest.  Continue piping until you are all around the cake. Are we done yet?  Oh no, wait there is more!

Step 5: Add colored accent piping.

You can finish it off with any decoration you like. Happy Piping.