Using a Pastry Bag to Decorate Cakes

Video Transcript

"Now I'll show you how to use a pastry bag. First you want to hold the pastry bag in your hand like this, and with your thumb and your finger, gather up the excess bag on the top. The fullness of the bag is going to sit in the palm of your hand like that. Now you can twist the bag while pinching that top, pinching the twist, with your thumb and your finger, in your hand like that. And that causes a pressure in the bag. You can feel that it gets full and tight, and you really want to hold on tightly with your thumb and finger like that. Now you'll use your fingers - the other four fingers - and your palm to squeeze the bag. And as it squeezes the frosting out, you'll have to continue to turn and twist the bag while holding on tightly with your thumb and the edge of your hand right here. You can see here how as I twist it I'm holding tightly here, and when I squeeze, the frosting will come out. And I'm squeezing with my fingers and my palm. We're just going to use a star tip and make little stars for our border. And how you do that is you squeeze, holding the tip just slightly above the cake. You're not touching the cake, you're not pushing the tip into the cake. You're holding it just a tiny bit above, maybe an eighth of an inch above the cake, and squeezing. And then before you lift the tip away, you want to release pressure. Now if you continue with pressure while you're lifting, you're going to end up with a big tip. Okay, let me show you that again nice and close up. First I'm going to clean off the tip there. Now you hold the tip about an eighth of an inch over the surface. And you squeeze, until you get a little star. And you release the pressure of your hand and lift up at the same time. Now here's what you don't do. I'm squeezing, squeezing, squeezing and then I'm lifting. And I end up with a big tip here that we don't want. You want to hold it, squeeze, release pressure, and pull up. And then you get a nice star."