Baking Basics: How to Prepare a Piping Bag

In this post we are going to go into detail on how to prepare a piping bag to pipe buttercream with.

First off, it's helpful to have piping bags around if you're planning on piping. They're not that expensive. I buy them by the hundred. However, if you've never piped before and don't happen to have any piping bags, you can use a regular plastic freezer bag. Just make sure that they are as heavy duty as possible. The one I show here didn't last long.

 In order to use a piping bag, you need a hole in the end. It doesn't actually come with a hole. You have to cut one with a pair of scissors. Just snip off an end that is large enough for whatever you want to get through to peek it's tip out without falling out of the bag completely.

Here you can see a coupler. That's an adapter that allows you to use more than one piping tip with the same piping bag. That's helpful if you want to use the same color buttercream with more than one tip. However, you should be aware that not all piping tips will fit your coupler no matter what size coupler you have. Piping tip sizes vary widely, so only some of them will work with your coupler.

The way a coupler works is that one piece goes inside the piping bag, with the tip peeking out, and the second part screws onto it to make it secure. There are several different sizes and kinds of couplers. Some have two parts and some have three. The one pictured has three pieces. One piece inside the bag, one outside that screws onto it and a third piece that secures the tip to the coupler. Sometimes the outside piece is also the one that secures the tip to the coupler, which makes it only have two pieces.

 It may shock you to know, however, that it is not necessary to have a coupler to pipe. Here you can see the various sizes of piping tips. The ones in the middle are kind of standard sized tips. The one at the bottom of the frame is a grass tip and doesn't fit onto my coupler. As you can see, the large one in the back definitely won't fit on my coupler. The purple plastic piece on the right is the third piece of the coupler.

 Here I'll show you how to use the plastic freezer bag. First, you trim off a corner of the bag with a pair of scissors and put the grass tip, or whatever piping tip you want to use, into the bag, letting the tip peek out the little hole you cut. Make sure not to cut the hole too large or your tip will fall right through it.

 Now that we have our tips in bags, all we need to do is add buttercream into them. That's easy enough. Just roll down the edges of the bag, spoon a tablespoon or two of buttercream of whatever color you prefer into the bag fitted with your tip, roll the edges back up, press the buttercream downward, squeezing until you can see it peeking through the tip, and twist the top closed so the rest of the buttercream doesn't come squirting out the top. You can also use a hair tie or rubber band or garbage tie to keep the top closed.

Now you're ready to start piping!

Watch us prepare piping bags for you on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/5gKN2Ovuupg
Schaut zu, wie wir Spritzbeutel vorbereiten auf unserem YouTube Kanal hier: https://youtu.be/EpguX6EPf3w