Piping 101 | Bake It Up a Notch with Erin McDowell

[Music] or you can write in cursive if I can even remember how to write in cursive what's up Assam cursor [Music] today we are gonna talk all things piping I get a lot of people telling me how intimidated they are by piping then it seems fancy and like you have to be a pastry chef to do it and that just isn't true it's actually really great to learn the skills of piping to help you with other things in baking as well like filling pans filling cakes all sorts of things so I'm really excited to dive in deeper and show you everything you need to know there are two main kinds of pastry bags there are cloth or disposable that are made of plastic you can use either one but the most important thing to be aware of is the size of the pastry bag pastry bags come most often for home bakers in a size about twelve inches and that's good but it does not hold very much frosting so you're gonna be refilling the bag a lot I like a bag around 16 or 18 inches in length like this one this is 18 and it just allows you to be able to not have to fill the bag as often and it also makes it a little bit easier to use which you're gonna see once it's full so when you're filling a pastry bag you're gonna start by folding back portion of the pastry bag onto itself whenever you hold a pastry bag you kind of want a picture holding your hands in a C shape to hold it like this once we have it open that's where the frosting is gonna go but we also need to fit it with our tip if you're using a tip so for that I'm just gonna grab my pastry tip and I need to cut a portion off at the end of the bag that's just wide enough that the tip will stick out but not so wide that it'll be pushed out so I'm going to cut with the scissors we drop the tip into the end of the bag [Music] like that [Music] once your pastry bag is all set to go you can continue holding that C shape with your hand to fill it and that's what I like to do or adds a little bit easier you can set it into a glass like this and fill it that way just makes it a little easier you can drape that outside portion over the edges of the glass you want to hold it in your hand you can kind of use your hand to scrape the spatula clean now when you're filling the pastry bag you never want to fill it much more than halfway full the reason is it becomes very difficult to squeeze it gets really hard on your hand so you might be okay for the first few minutes but it's just gonna get more and more difficult you're gonna get tired so now that the bag is full you can shake it a couple of times to help that frosting settle towards the bottom then we're gonna take any excess that's at the top and we're gonna twist it several times and we're gonna hold that twist between the thumb and forefinger of your dominant hand kind of right in here in the crook of this part of your hand so you twist twist twist if you don't twist you're going to meet disaster later whenever I'm not using my pastry bag I like to set it in the glass because it's an easy way to keep it upright not get frosting all over your counter any more than you already will while you're working with frosting and just a nice way to be able to grab it at the ready now there's two angles that you can hold a pastry bag at depending on what kind of effect you're going for and really there's lots of different angles but the primary two for the most common things that you're gonna do are straight up and down on the item that you're piping on like this cupcake or at a 45 degree angle so those are the two angles that you're going to see the most often depending on the effects that you're doing when you're ready to pipe you're going to apply pressure with this part of your hand you're squeezing with these fingers and you're kind of squeezing the bag between your palm and your fingers and you apply sure allowing the frosting to come out of the bag and when you're ready to stop piping you simply stop applying pressure now that sounds easy enough it's a little harder when you come to the item so to start I'm just gonna pipe onto this cupcake trying straight up and down and I'll pipe a little spiral here now there's no more frosting coming out of the bag because I stopped applying pressure and then a flick of your wrist can kind of break the frosting away that's one example another examples if you're holding it out of that 45 degree angle and you're applying pressure and when you want to stop you stop squeezing here and pull away so applying the pressure pulling away applying pressure pulling away and that is how you're gonna do it when you're holding it at that forty-five degree angle when you're piping your wrist dictates the larger movements and your hand dictates the finer ones so for example let's just move that one aside if I want to make a spiral around the outer edge of this cupcake my wrist is doing the work there my wrist is moving in a circular motion but if I want to pipe something more delicate like a dot my hand is kind of dictating that my hand is the one that's moving up and down so your wrist is going to make larger movements like spirals and swoops and your hand is gonna move a little up and down or side to side to make the finer movements when you hold a pastry bag straight up and down those are most commonly used when you're trying to pipe a beautiful little mound like a GU share a cream puff something like that it's also often used to pipe on the top of a cupcake when you hold it an angle like this that's more commonly used to fill cake layers pipe script or pipe borders decorative borders on the sides of cakes so now that you know a little bit of the basics of what's going on with the pastry bag and you're not intimidated by it you know how to hold it let's put a few different tips in and see what we can do let me tell you about my best bro his name is Brandon Lee let's talk about couplers a coupler is a small plastic piece not int'rested a a coupler is a small piece of plastic it looks a little like a pastry tip and a pastry tip screws on to the end it allows you to change tips without changing the pastry bag so if you just put a tip directly into the bottom of a pastry bag that works great but if you're ever doing a big project where you're using lots of colors or lots of shapes the coupler can really come in handy so to fit the pastry bag with a coupler you just cut the end off you place the coupler into the pastry bag [Music] until the end of it sticks out like that then your pastry tip goes on the end and you use the plastic ring to screw it in place so when you want to switch the tip to have a different one you just unscrew the plastic ring remove the tip and place your other pastry tip on right Bramley you done one of the biggest questions I get about piping is help the piping Oh hold on help the frosting is always coming out of the back of my bag and I can't seem to control it so the first reason that that happens is that your bag is too full remember only fill it about halfway full this bag is too full right now so when I go to squeeze it's very difficult for me to wrap my hand around and the more that I'm squeezing to pipe frosting is coming out that backside because it's just too full the other reason it can happen is you can be really really tempted even if you've got it all twisted the way you're supposed to sometimes people want to hold it down here like this because they feel like they have more precision to get exactly what they want but when you're doing that you're the pressure that you're applying here is forcing the frosting upward upward upward and eventually it is going to come out the back of the bag so to avoid that if you're feeling like you need to be holding it lower just squeeze some of the frosting out of your bag to make it have a little bit less twist the bag really really well and remember hold it up at that twist use that extra pastry bag as your grip then nothing's moving out the back of the bag and you're left with nothing but perfect piping just like that another one of the questions I get more often than anything else is how in the heck do I clean these pastry tips my favorite method is to take the dirty pastry tip it's still filled with icing I use my finger to push out as much of the icing as I possibly can and then I put it directly into a small glass of very warm even boiling water the warm water loosens all the frosting that's inside and makes it much easier to rinse out the tip and then clean it with soap and water high-five can I paw give me your paw okay a few things to know about pastry tips before we get started pastry tips come in lots of different shapes and sizes there's usually a number on the side of the pastry tube that can denote the size here's one too however the exact size isn't super important it's more about the shape if you're trying to imitate a look that was made with a star tip you're gonna want to use the star tip and it is also important to remember that if you opt for a larger tip that's going to require more icing so if you pipe little tiny stars all around the cake that'll use less icing than if you pipe big fat stars so let's start piping with some round tips and see what kind of effects we can make I'm gonna start with a medium round tip so I'm just gonna fill my pastry bag with some icing Kati always does this I don't usually do it but oh that's why I don't do it I got it on the floor I'll clean it up in a second so one of the things that you can do with a round tip is pipe sort of pearls or mounds so to pipe a pearl shape you're gonna hold the bag straight up and down apply pressure allowing the icing to kind of fall out onto itself on the sides [Music] one of the things that I do to help me pipe things in a consistent size as I count in my head so I'll count when I'm squeezing the first one and I'll say 1 2 3 4 then when I pipe the next one I'll count at the same speed 2 3 4 and that helps me to get them the same size but I'm also somebody who believes what does it matter if they're all random I think people think that piping has to mean some fancy you know precision perfect but if I just pipe some little err pearls next to these and then some bigger ones over here and over there that looks pretty great too so there's no reason that they all have to be uniform but if that's the look that you're going for I think that little counting trip is super helpful so again to pipe a path around or pearl shape I'm just gonna start applying the pressure and letting the icing kind of flow on to itself when I get to the top I'm stopping applying pressure and a flick of the wrist is what's going to release the icing now if I don't stop applying pressure when I get to the top this is what happens if you stop applying pressure and you drag it up you're still applying pressure when you lift it and it's not gonna maintain that round shape so it's really important what you do instead start squeezing when you like the shape you stop squeezing and then you can remove the pastry bag we're gonna now pipe with a larger tip and I'm gonna show you some of the things that you can do with it for one we can do that same kind of thing so this is actually the size of tip I would use to pipe a cream puff or a goo share and you so you can make more like portioning your pastry dough's rather than piping effects only and again I've already almost used the frosting that was in my bag making only five mounds because this is a much bigger tip so you're using a lot more icing so you can also use a tip like this to pipe kind of an upward spiral and that's a great technique for cupcakes in particular so you kind of pick a spot and you follow it around and when you get to the next stage you build up and you keep building up and up and up until you like it and then you pull away leaving a nice little dollop now I'm going to go back to my medium round tip and I'm also gonna show kind of piping some spirals like you might do on the side of a cake or a sort of a finishing decorative technique so for that you sort of want to pick your spot drop it down holding it away from the surface let it fall and you're making the shape with your wrist as you let it fall and you're kind of ahead of the game you're a little ways ahead of where the icing is falling so that you can control it I'm going very slowly but obviously once you get going you can go a lot faster and finally I sometimes use a small tip to do writing so let's try a little writing here now there's two ways to write you can write in cursive or you can write in scrip so I'm going to start with the easier one which is writing in script and you're gonna do a very similar thing you'll drop the first portion and let it kind of pulling it down as you fall and then you touch down where you want the letter to end and you can keep piping in this way this is a very clean script sometimes I use a toothpick to kind of trace what I want to do first onto the icing of the cake making it a little easier on myself and when you're piping text you're doing it usually at a 45 degree angle because you're trying to maintain a similar kind of angle to what you would use if you were writing with a pen or you can write in cursive if I can even remember how to write in cursive what's a peasant cursive maybe I'll just do my name in school they just always made us write happy birthday another thing that you can do with a round tip is a common technique used in cookie decorating called flooding for flooding you use royal icing you need a thick consistency to pipe the outside ring on the cookie and a thinner consistency to fill the inside so what I'm gonna do first is with my thicker icing I'm gonna pipe a ring around the outside of the cookie right at the very edge and again I'm sort of holding it away from the cookie that's very common in piping to get a little distance which allows you to kind of guide it in a more gentle way and when you get to the end and you're about to make contact just stop applying pressure and drag it and you can use your finger or a toothpick to kind of smush them together the icing is very soft and one last time [Music] now you let that set for just a few minutes and then you add in your softer icing it sets pretty quickly so you don't need it to set super entirely you just need it to set enough that it makes that firm outside wall and they call it flooding because you really are kind of just flooding the cookie up to that line so I like to just drag the icing around using the tip to help me get it into each corner just like that you can even kind of give the cookie a little shake to help settle that icing and then you've got this beautiful smooth surface great for cookie decorating you just don't want to disturb that until it's totally set and then you can pipe more decorations on top of it using any of the other piping techniques that we're talking about next we're gonna talk about star tips now within the category of star tips there are three other little categories and star tips are one of my most favorite for using people ask me a lot oh I don't know which tips I should buy I don't know if I need a whole set and star tips are one of the ones I use the absolute most and they're really really versatile and a fun effect so the three different kinds of star tips are as follows you have a classic star tip like this which is also often called an open star tip then you have the closed star tip which looks a lot like the open star tip except that the edges come in a little bit so it's a more closed effect which creates a little bit of a ruffle look and then finally you have the French star tip which just has almost twice as many ridges is the classic star tip so it just gives a little bit of a fancier look so let's fill our pastry bag and pipe with some star tip so I'm gonna start with one of the easiest things you can pipe with a star tip which is sort of a flower shape so to do that you just hold it straight up and down apply pressure and then when you're done with the shape and you like the way it looks you just pull up I'm gonna put a little icing under my paper to help it stay in place straight up and down applying pressure you can make really cute little flowers let's fill our other two shapes that you can see what those same flowers will look like with the different star tips because this is one of the easiest effects you can do so here we have the closed star tip and as you can see it just sort of ruffles more as it comes out pretty but a very similar look and finally we have the French which is the fanciest and for that here's what they look like because there's more ridges on the tip it has more edges to make this little pattern defect so let's try making a rosette to do that you're just going to drop down in a very similar shape to the flower but you're gonna move in a spiral shape so to do that I also like to hold it straight up and down and we're gonna move our wrist to make a spiral shape and when you're done this is one where you like to stop applying the pressure about here in the rosette and then pull so that it kind of finishes that round shape practicing on parchment like this is what we did in pastry school we practice on parchment or little cardboard cake squares and it's a really good way to kind of get in the groove of it before you actually try it on your cake another of the most common things that people use a star tip for is to make shells so a shell is a good example of talking about making a continuous effect as well so when you make a shell you're holding it at a 45 degree angle apply pressure while moving kind of up and over then you release the pressure and drag away from the shape that you just made so here I am I've got my pastry tip down I'm applying the pressure up and over and then I'm pulling it away then I'm gonna start again right near where I left off [Music] applying pressure pulling away applying pressure pulling away applying pressure pulling away and I'm just continuing to move back towards where I was before to make a continuous pattern a rope is another really easy pattern and it's one of those that looks a little bit more complicated when it's done and it actually is to produce so to start we're applying pressure and then dragging it away then we'll start towards the center of the shape we made before and pull away in the opposite direction [Music] continuing to pipe kind of right where the last one left off applying pressure and then when I get to the end I just release and drag release and drag and in the end it really looks like a braided rope a spiral shape with a star tip is something you might do on a larger item like a cupcake or on the very top of a cake is a pretty way to decorate it you're gonna squeeze a little icing from my small smaller tip into my big one here insiders look as to how you do it remember when we have a bigger tip that means we need more icing but whoever was sad to have more icing not I okay so to pipe a spiral it's very similar to what we did with the round tip you're just gonna drop the icing and make a circle when you get to where the circle ends you just continue making a smaller circle on your way up just like that how pretty on the top of a cupcake you put a sprinkle on there mmm you're set ready to go one of the easiest ways to frost a cupcake gotta love it there are a lot of different kinds of tips but my personal favorite are the round tips the star tips and our final one here the petal tip now it's called a petal tip because it's usually used to make floral effects make all different kinds of flowers and there are a lot of different kinds of petal tips because they're used to make different kinds of flowers but they can also be used to make a few other effects that are really really fun and easy to do like ruffles so that's what I'm gonna show you first so to make a ruffled effect every petal tip has kind of a wider end and a thinner end so the wider end is usually what you want to be on the base resting on your pastry or your cake whatever and the thinner end is what's going to be on top creating the delicate ruffle effect so for this you hold your pastry bag at a 45 degree angle and you're gonna use your wrists to wiggle back and forth as you move down the paper so you start squeezing and it creates this beautiful ruffled look now let's try it with a different shaped tip here and the wider you move the wider your ruffles will be that's a very very easy one to do you can also use these tips to make floral effects and when you're doing that you're making sort of a petal and you're usually squeezing and moving your tip in sort of an arc and this is a worthwhile effect to mention because you can also do it independently of making flowers to make just sort of swoopy neat effects and we'll show you how to make an actual little flower on our cupcakes a little bit later we've got one final petal tip here and this one is sort of a u-shape this is another really fun one that makes nice shapes especially for different kinds of pastries it makes a nice larger finishing effect especially on pies tarts things like that and with this one you can kind of pull up to create these petal like wall effects or you can pull and make your ruffle effect let's try that one more time over here [Music] these are a really fun technique for beginners because they're really really easy to execute but I think that these tips scare a lot of people more than others partially because they think that they have to make these really fancy impressive flowers but there's really a lot you can do with a petal tip when you're running out of icing on a piping bag it becomes much more difficult to actually do any work so before you even get down to that last little bit it's a good idea to refill the bag when you refill the bag there is always going to be a pocket of air between where your old frosting ends and where your new frosting begins so it's important to squeeze the remaining icing that's in there out until you hear that air bubble pop otherwise it's going to pop while you're piping and brewing your effect so I'm gonna add some icing to my bag that still has a little left in it and I'm gonna squeeze it back into the bowl until I hear a pop there it is that was the air bubble popping and now I can resume piping without fear of it interrupting my work [Music] it's important to remember that as you're working with the frosting the heat of your hand is warming it up so the more often you're putting you're squeezing the frosting especially as it gets down to the bottom that frosting is gonna be looser and warmer so sometimes it's good idea to just fill your bags a little less and refill them more often so that you're not warming larger amounts of frosting and they're starting to become a runny consistency now I'm gonna pipe a flower on this cupcake and I'm using a petal tip the skinnier side of the tip is facing up and the thicker side of the tip is facing the surface of the cupcake I'm gonna start by piping a little spiral in the center of the cupcake that's sort of the center of our flower and then I'm just gonna pipe moving in kind of an arc motion working around the cupcake to make petals so I just start with the base down I move up and as you get to the edge of the cupcake you can kind of change your angle so instead of being straight up and down you can come a little wider because flowers are often more open at the outside it's like that you made a flower [Music] let's do a few more [Music] one of the things I like about piping is actually keeping it sort of random combining different tips and different shapes and when you go with a random pattern then no one can really notice if your shapes aren't all the same size they're not perfect and in this case you can actually use the piping to cover up places on the cake that I don't like as much maybe where there's a mistake in the frosting or there's just something I don't like and I can cover it up with something pretty and yummy like frosting [Music] [Applause] [Music] I think can seem really intimidating but it doesn't have to be hard with a little bit of practice you can do all of these effects and so many more piping can actually make certain tasks like glazing this bundt cake so much easier filling this layer cake there's so many ways that having it as a tool in your arsenal it's gonna really really help you in the kitchen so I hope you had so much fun baking with me today I had so much fun making all of these things today and you can find all these recipes on food 52 and if you had fun baking with me today be sure to like and subscribe see you next time and happy baking [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Food52

Views: 264,816

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, pastry, piping, Bake It Up a Notch, Erin McDowell, icing, cakes, bundt cake, cupcakes, flooding icing, cookies, piping flowers, piping rope, piping shells, layer cake, frosting cupcakes, pastry tip, pastry bag, piping tip, piping bag, pipe icing, icing designs, piping designs, decorate cupcakes, decorate cakes, decorate cookies, butter cream, ateco pastry tip, wilton pastry tip, round tip, star tip, petal tip

Id: 5txYV2FTHEY

Length: 31min 37sec (1897 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020