Striped Buttercream Cake | The Piping Trick That Transforms Cakes
Chef Alan TetreaultIn this tutorial: Choosing the Right Tools · Preparing Your Buttercream · Applying the Base Coat and Combing · Chilling and Adding the Stripe Color · Revealing the Stripes · Ombre Striping with Multiple Colors · Diagonal Stripe Variation · Finishing with Piped Borders and Sprinkles · Tips for Mixing Pastel Colors
Striped buttercream cakes look impressive, but the technique is surprisingly accessible – even for beginners – once a few key secrets are in place. In this detailed tutorial, Chef Alan Tetreault of Global Sugar Art walks through everything from buttercream consistency to combing technique, revealing the tricks that most tutorials leave out. He also demonstrates an ombre variation using multiple colors piped into the grooves and a diagonal stripe twist for added visual interest.
What You'll Need
- Icing comb with teeth – brands like Wilton, Ateco, and PME all make combs designed for striping; the toothed style creates the grooves needed for this technique
- Metal bench scraper – Fat Daddio's bench scrapers are Chef Alan's favorite for smoothing and revealing stripes
- Offset spatula – for applying buttercream and cleaning up the top edge
- Turntable – for spinning the cake smoothly while combing
- Piping bags – disposable pastry bags (18-inch) for filling in stripes with colored icing
- Piping tip – Wilton tip 1B for the border rosettes
- Metal or glass bowl – for warming the buttercream over hot water
- Pot of hot water – for warming icing, the comb, and the bench scraper
- Towel – for drying tools after dipping
- Buttercream icing – must contain at least 40–50% butter (see notes below)
- Gel food coloring – for tinting stripe colors
- Sprinkles (optional) – for finishing; Chef Alan uses a Sprinkle Pop signature mix
Choosing the Right Tools
Not all icing combs are created equal. Combs with smooth, wave-shaped edges are designed to create textured patterns – not stripes. For this technique, the comb needs teeth that cut grooves into the buttercream. Ateco makes a narrower metal version, Wilton offers a plastic option, and PME has acrylic combs with deeper teeth.
The depth of the teeth determines how thick the icing coat needs to be. A PME acrylic comb has deeper teeth and requires a thicker layer, while the Wilton comb works with roughly a quarter-inch coat.
Preparing Your Buttercream
The buttercream recipe is the foundation of successful striping. The fat content must be at least 40% butter – ideally 50% or higher. A 100% butter buttercream works beautifully. If a whiter icing is preferred and some vegetable shortening (such as Crisco or Sweetex) is added, butter should still make up at least half of the fat.
Butter serves two purposes: it creates a smoother, creamier icing that combs cleanly, and it firms up well when chilled – which is critical for the striping process. Vegetable shortening does not firm up the same way.
💡 Tip: Use cane sugar (such as Domino's cane powdered sugar) rather than beet sugar for the smoothest buttercream. Beet sugar does not produce as smooth a consistency.
↪ Warming the Buttercream
This is the critical secret Chef Alan shares: slightly warming the buttercream before applying it makes all the difference. Standard buttercream – even a good recipe – tends to rip, gouge, and leave air holes when combed at room temperature.
To warm the icing:
- Bring a pot of water to just below boiling (beginners should use hot but not boiling water).
- Place the metal or glass bowl of buttercream into the hot water for 4–10 seconds at a time.
- Remove and stir. The bottom of the bowl should look shiny – that is the butter softening.
- Repeat until the icing is noticeably looser and softer but not melted or runny.
⚠️ Do not leave the bowl sitting in the water – the butter will melt and the icing will break. The goal is to soften, not liquefy.
💡 Tip: Italian buttercream and Swiss meringue buttercream may not need this step. Their high fat content and meringue base make them naturally smooth and easy to comb.
Applying the Base Coat and Combing
Start with a crumb-coated cake that has been refrigerated for about 30 minutes. Do not freeze it – warm icing applied to a frozen cake will harden on contact and cannot be combed.
- Apply the warmed buttercream to the sides of the cake. Work quickly so the icing stays soft. The layer only needs to be as thick as the depth of the comb's teeth.
- Fill in any shallow spots and add icing to the top as well (excess will come off during combing).
- Smooth the sides with a spatula to ensure even coverage.
↪ Combing the Cake
Before combing, dip the comb in hot water for a few seconds on each side, then dry it thoroughly – the comb should be warm but not wet.
- Hold the comb perpendicular to the cake (not at an angle). Angling the comb traps icing between the comb and the cake, causing it to pull and tear.
- Place the comb against the cake and try to go around in one continuous sweep, spinning the turntable steadily.
- Inspect the grooves. If there are spots where the comb missed, fill them in with more icing, re-warm and dry the comb, and go around again.
💡 Tip: Start at the front of the cake and gradually move the comb toward the side as the turntable spins, so the entire circumference is combed in one motion.
Chilling and Adding the Stripe Color
Once the combed base coat looks good, refrigerate the cake for about 30 minutes (or freeze for 15 minutes). The base icing must be firm and cold before the next step – if it is not chilled enough, the two colors will smear together.
↪ Applying the Contrast Color
The second coat of icing – in the stripe color – does not need to be warmed, since it will not be combed. Simply apply a thin, even coat of the colored buttercream over the entire chilled, combed surface, making sure to fill all the grooves completely.
Revealing the Stripes
This is where the stripes appear. A metal bench scraper is preferred over plastic because it can be warmed in the hot water for a cleaner cut through the cold icing.
- Dip the bench scraper in hot water and dry it (a dry scraper prevents water droplets from running down the colored icing).
- Hold it straight against the cake and shave off thin layers – do not try to remove too much at once. The base icing underneath is cold and firm, so gentle passes work best.
- Repeat: warm the scraper, dry it, and take off another thin layer until the stripes are fully revealed.
- Use the offset spatula to carefully clean any colored icing off the top of the cake.
⚠️ Always dry the bench scraper before smoothing the sides. A water droplet on the colored icing will run down and create a streak that cannot be fixed.
💡 Tip: If the striping goes wrong – too much icing scraped off, raw cake showing through – simply scrape all the buttercream off carefully. That scraped icing becomes the new solid-color base. Re-chill and start again. The project is not ruined.
Ombre Striping with Multiple Colors
For an ombre effect, pipe different shades directly into the grooves instead of coating the entire cake with one color. Chef Alan demonstrates this with three shades of yellow – dark, medium, and pale.
- Start with the darkest color at the bottom of the cake. Darker colors provide a visual foundation and "weight" the design.
- Pipe the medium shade into the middle grooves.
- Pipe the palest shade into the top grooves. If the very top stripe is left as the original white base, there is no colored icing to clean off the top.
- Use the bench scraper (warmed and dried) to shave off thin layers, just as with the single-color method.
💡 Tip: Darker colors almost always look better at the bottom of a cake. Placing them at the top makes the design feel top-heavy.
Diagonal Stripe Variation
For an extra design element, diagonal stripes can be added to the sides of a freshly striped cake – while the icing is still soft, before chilling. Place a triangle (from a geometry set) flat against the table, hold an offset spatula (dipped in warm water and dried) along the angled edge, and drag it straight up the side of the cake. This creates clean diagonal lines through the horizontal stripes.
Finishing with Piped Borders and Sprinkles
Chef Alan finishes the cake with rosettes piped around the top edge using a Wilton 1B tip. For a two-tone piped effect, load one color on each side of the pastry bag using a spatula, then rotate the bag while piping so different colors show on different sides of each rosette.
Sprinkles add the final touch. Chef Alan recommends choosing sprinkles before selecting cake colors – match the palette to the sprinkles rather than trying to find sprinkles that match after the fact.
Tips for Mixing Pastel Colors
When mixing a pastel shade like seafoam green (leaf green plus a touch of turquoise), never drop gel color directly into white icing – it will always be too dark, and blending multiple colors together in white icing makes it even harder to control.
Instead, premix the colors into a small amount of white icing first to create a concentrated blend, then add small amounts of that blend into a larger batch of white icing until the desired pastel shade is reached.
This tutorial is part of Global Sugar Art's library of free cake decorating videos by Chef Alan Tetreault. Browse all tutorials →
