What is actually in a 158-piece decorating kit

Decorating kits are sold on a number: 71, 158, 567, 700. The number is real, and it is also mostly disposable piping bags. Here is how to read it.

A typical 158-piece breakdown

Approximate, and it varies by maker, but the shape is consistent:

• Around 50 disposable piping bags — a third of the count in one consumable item.
• Around 48 numbered tips — the actual substance of the kit.
• 2 reusable bags
• 2 couplers
• 2 or 3 icing spatulas
• 3 cake scrapers or combs
• 1 turntable
• A handful of flower nails, bag ties, a brush, a chart

So of 158 pieces, perhaps sixty are things you keep. That is not a swindle — fifty bags is genuinely useful and they have to be counted somehow — but it means comparing two kits on the headline number tells you almost nothing.

How to compare two kits honestly

Four questions, in order of how much they matter.

1. Does it include a turntable, and is it metal? This is the single most expensive component and the one that most changes results. A kit with an aluminium turntable is a different proposition from one with a plastic one, or none.
2. How many distinct tips, and are they numbered? Not total pieces — distinct tips. Numbered tips can be matched to any tutorial; unnumbered ones cannot.
3. Are the tips stainless steel? Plastic tips lose definition as the edges soften.
4. Does it include couplers? Without them you cannot change tips without changing bags.

Everything else — the number of disposable bags, the ties, the brush — is padding in the honest sense: real, useful, cheap, and not what distinguishes one kit from another.

The very large kits

Kits in the 500 to 700 range usually add fondant tools: modelling sticks, embossers, cutters, smoothers, moulds.

That is a different craft from buttercream piping. If you want to work with fondant, the large kit is genuinely good value because those tools individually are not cheap. If you do not, you are storing a box of implements you will never open.

Be honest about which of the two you are before buying the bigger number.

What kits do not include

Worth knowing before the first project:

• Cake boards. Almost never included, and you need one under the cake on the turntable.
• Food colouring. Rarely included; gel colours rather than liquid, because liquid thins buttercream.
• A levelling knife or serrated blade — some kits have a leveller, many do not.
• Storage. Most kits arrive in a box that will not survive being opened repeatedly. A compartment box for the tips is worth having.

The 71-piece kits

Smaller kits — around 71 pieces — typically have twelve tips, fifty bags, a turntable and a couple of spatulas. For someone decorating a few cakes a year that is genuinely enough, and twelve well-chosen tips cover far more than most people use.

Buying the smaller kit and adding individual tips later is a perfectly sensible route, and often the cheaper one.

Which to buy

Never decorated before: a mid-size kit with a metal turntable and numbered stainless tips. You will use a fraction of it and you do not yet know which fraction.

Decorated a few times: buy the specific tips you keep reaching for, individually, plus a roll of good bags. You already own the turntable.

Moving to fondant: the large kit, for the modelling tools.

Storing one

Get the tips out of the original packaging and into a compartment box, numbers visible. The manufacturer’s tray is designed to display in a shop, not to be used weekly, and a tip that has been dented pipes a distorted shape permanently.

Keep the pattern chart with the box. It is the most useful piece of paper in the kit and the first thing to be thrown away.

On the shelf

The full kits, with piece counts exactly as the manufacturer states them, are on the complete decorating kits page. Individual tips and bags are under piping bags and tips, turntables on their own at turntables and stands, and scrapers, levellers and spatulas at icing tools and spatulas.