A better way to pipe

Exam week #3. One of the products we had to make was a cake covered in buttercream, decorated with 2 different types of piping techniques.

There's a few problems with this:

- I suck at piping. I can make a good rosette (a rosette is a little circular swirl made with a star tip) about 1 out of 4 times.

- The only way to get better at piping is to spend roughly 103830834083 hours practicing. Since I have no interest in being a professional cake decorator, that time would be better spent doing something else.

- If you pipe a reject onto a cake, you have to scrape it off and start over. This is annoying and time consuming, especially when your skills are at a level where 3 out of 4 of your piping shapes are going to be rejects.

I had to come up with a better way. Knowing that buttercream can be frozen gave me an idea. How about if I pipe a bunch of rosettes onto a Silpat and freeze them? Then simply stick the frozen rosettes onto the cake?

So I piped rosettes on a Silpat in a sheet pan until I had about 10 good ones, then put it in the freezer. 20 minutes later I had 10 perfect rosettes that I just scraped off the Silpat, smeared a tiny bit of room temperature buttercream on the bottom as a glue, and stuck onto the cake. HAHA! Brilliant!