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The holiday season is definitely the time of year where decorated cookies are shine. It seems like everyone makes gingerbread people or snowmen or cute little Christmas trees. And while I will never turn down a frosted cookie no matter what it looks like, there are definitely some decorated cookies that come out better than others. One of the best ways to get neatly decorated cookies is by using a piping bag.
I was very intimidated the first time I used a piping bag because where does the tip go??? What is a coupler??? How do I get frosting inside of it??? I spent a long time on the internet before the first time I used a piping bag, so I’m hoping this post will help anyone new to piping bags get started!
What You Need
To pipe beautiful frosting designs you’ll need a piping bag, a piping tip, and–depending on the size of your piping tip–a coupler. To make everything more confusing, there are multiple sizes of piping bags and multiple sizes of piping tips and couplers.
For piping bags I usually like to get bigger ones (12″ or larger) because you can always cut them down to be smaller, but you can’t make the smaller ones any bigger when you’re trying to fit in just a little bit more frosting.
Piping tips come in generally smaller and generally larger sizes (please excuse the very technical terminology). The larger ones are better for cakes and cupcakes, and you don’t need to use a coupler when you’re using a larger size tip. The smaller ones are perfect for cookies, and while they do require a coupler, it makes it easier to change out tips to make more fun designs!
Setting Up a Large Piping Tip
Setting up a piping bag with a large piping tip is easy. Drop the tip into the bag and push it until it’s tight at the bottom. Then just use scissors to cut the plastic below the tip and push the tip down until it pokes through.
Setting Up a Small Piping Tip and Coupler
Using a small piping tip requires using a coupler, as well. (You can use a large coupler with a large piping tip, but it’s not required since the tip is large enough to stay in the place in the bag on its own.)
The coupler has two pieces: the base and the ring. The first thing you’ll want to do is unscrew the ring from the base.
Then put the base of the coupler inside the piping bag and push it as far down in the bag as it will go, making a note of where the end of the base is.
Then you’ll push the base back up into the bag a little bit to make room for you to cut where the end of the base just was.
Once you’ve cut off the tip of the bag, push the base all the way down so the end of the base sticks out of the end of the bag. Then place your piping tip onto the end of the coupler.
This next part reallllly tripped me up when I was using a piping bag for the first time. You’re going to take the ring and screw it back on to the base OVER the plastic. It never made sense to me how that would work. How could the ring screw back on with the plastic in the way??? I don’t know why I just couldn’t wrap my head around that. But the plastic is so thin that you just put the ring over the piping tip and screw it back onto the base as if the plastic wasn’t even there.
How to Fill Your Piping Bag
Now that your piping bag is all set up, it’s time to fill it with frosting! There are tons of ways to do this, but I’ve found that the easiest way is to set your piping bag into a tall cup and open the bag over the sides of the cup. The tip and coupler will just sort of nestle into the bottom of the cup.
Once it’s set up on the cup, the piping bag is really easy to fill with frosting. Depending on how tall your cup is, though, you might pull the bag out once you’ve filled it and find that the frosting hasn’t reached all the way to the bottom. That’s totally fine! Just squeeze from the top of the bag and the frosting will come right down and out the piping tip!
There are so many different techniques for piping and different ways you can use different piping tips, but that will be a whole separate post someday. In the meantime, have fun with it! Play around with the shapes that come from your different piping tips and decorate your baked goods however you see fit. At the end of the day, all that matters is they taste good!