Frosting Bags

This entire guide is about buttercream. Most of it will work on "whipped" icing if it's well chilled (nearly frozen), or cream cheese if you really insist (don't; buttercream will hold up SO much better). If you're looking for Royal Icing or anything else, kindly go somewhere else.

Buttercream should be fairly stiff. If it's dripping out of your bag in a melty sort of way, you've done it wrong, try again. Setting a buttercream piping bag on a table for a few minutes should not cause any variety of mess; the biggest risk of splatter should be from pressure-based bag blowout. It should also be relatively sticky, and able to be manipulated with a spatula or spoon in large chunks, rather than being poured.

Colors are important. Food-safe dyes are easiest and cheapest to get in a liquid form, but use this with caution. It will quickly made a frosting runny, and it may have to be chilled in order to get it to stand up again. Color pastes are a good compromise, and cause less consistency changes, but still do take a fair amount of mixing to get blended. If using buttercream in some volume, it is possible to purchase entire buckets of shelf-stable, color-infused "buttercream" (ish) consistency frosting; mix this half and half with a better-tasting white buttercream recipe, optionally re-darkening or adjusting the shade with additional liquid or paste dye. DO NOT mix the black bucket frosting, and be VERY careful when creating greys and silvers; they turn into deeply unappetizing colors at a remarkable speed. No black dye is a true black; they all have a shade.

Colorant is bitter. Use as little as possible, using dark colors only as an accent, or in an airbrush coat over the area that needs covered (more on this later); which will still be bitter, but not on the entire layer of frosting. Depending on the situation, chocolate frosting makes a significantly better base for a dark color - black dye in a fudge frosting takes only a few drops, negligibly affecting the taste, but the cake must be appropriate to have a fudge frosting.

Food dyes work in the same way as paint. Red and yellow make orange, red and blue make purple, blue and yellow make green. Adjust proportions accordingly. For an easy de-saturated "autumn" looking palette, blend chocolate frosting into your colored vanilla.

Colors can fade. Don't use pastels on generic high-quantity displays; they'll fade out in a day or two. Go as bright as is physically possible on any window or demo displays that don't contain cake, since they won't be eaten anyway. Cakes that are being made for same-day use should be mixed more carefully, or kept in a dark and cold place for next-day use.

For the actual physical mixing of the dyes with the frosting, an electric mixer is the most time-efficient for large quantities; or bowls and spoons can be used for medium quantities at some effort. For single-bag amounts, a decorator with a reasonable grip strength should be able to mix their color in the piping bag, by adding the frosting and colorant, getting a good grip on both the tip end and the loading end, and mixing and kneading until the bag is well-mixed and ready to use.

Very important: PUT THE FROSTING TIP IN THE BAG BEFORE THE FROSTING. You don't have to cut the bag yet, if you're worried about leakage, but re-filling a bag works much the same way and it's usually fine.

One incredibly simple trick I have never seen used anywhere else to date is the "frosting jug". This involves a jug, pitcher, or some other variety of cylinder that is fairly tall, but narrower than the wide end of the piping bag (my favorite when I was doing this professionally was a blue plastic two-quart pitcher). Simply put the piping bag with the tip down the center of the cylinder, and fold the wide end around the edges as if installing a trash bag into a can. In this way, the bag is held upright and supported to receive whatever may be added to it; and folding the wide end far enough over the edges of the jug to where it's about even on the outside and the inside adds a terrific guide to keep from overfilling the bag.

In the absence of a frosting jug, simply turn the bag halfway inside-out where the open end is level with the tip. Have a friend help out and hold the bag while getting the frosting in, or a particularly large-handed or dexterous decorator may be able to support the bag in their off hand while manipulating spoons and colors in their dominant hand.

After a reasonable amount of frosting is in the bag (do be careful not to overload), twist the top 3-5 times around and secure with a twist tie or metal-based clip (do not use plastic, rubber bands, or anything stretchy). There should be several inches of empty bag above the secured point, and a reasonable amount of "squish room" between that point and the frosting tip. Cut the tip of the bag, if you haven't already, an amount JUST enough to get the "business end" of the frosting tip out of the bag, while leaving as much of the wider end inside the bag as possible.

If doing color mixing in the bag, also twist a point between the frosting tip and the majority of the frosting, pinch it very tightly with your hand, and use that vice grip as part of your process. Don't make more than you need of colors; they're always best the first day, and certain odd colors don't really have a better or different use (who else this week wants a cake with "puce"?).

So, there's some kind of Pinterest thing going around about putting your colors in little stupid rolls of plastic wrap, putting the plastic wrap in the bag, blah blah. Don't do that.

First, mix all of the colors you will be using in their own bags. Even white.

Second, use those bags to make vertical stripes, from the tip up to the turned-point of the bag in the jug or the hand, up the side of the piping bag. If the frosting isn't stiff enough to stay put for the minute or two to do that, don't use that frosting for stripes. If needed, make a second pass to add thickness or depth or whatever, especially if you're using more than two or three colors. Twist up, and use as normal.

Color-striped bags don't have to be multiple colors! Add a fairly small stripe or two to the side of a bag, and then load with white like usual. For an even cooler effect, put a little bit of a color in a bag, smash it around to cover all the sides, and load the bulk with white. I always called this technique "help, I'm running out of purple," but I think the technical term is "ombre". It looks really amazing with complex tips on flowers, stars, rosettes, or shells, with the color coming out on the edges of the shape but the white coming out in the center. Or skip the white and use a lighter, darker, or adjacent color in the center. Or chocolate. Or stripe a full-strength color with a chocolate-blended desaturated version. Go wild!

Tip for rainbows: adding just the primary colors works fine for most uses of rainbows, or only a narrow stripe of secondaries. There WILL be some blending on the way out. Also keep this in mind for all colors that share a bag, and don't mix complementaries in 99% of situations.

Keep your striped bags fairly small. They're not as versatile for re-use on other projects, and ombres do not do well for long-term storage, either in the bag or on the cake.

First of all, make sure ALL of the bags being used for the session are cut, filled, twisted, and tied; that they're all the correct temperature and consistency, and that all the tips are picked out and ready to go, even if they're not screwed on and will have to be changed mid-session (which happens for some designs).

To use any piping bag correctly, from a base icer to a writing tip, is the same grip. Take your non-dominant hand and tightly pinch the twist-tie point on the top of the bag in the base of your thumb. This hand will take the weight of the bag and any large-scale manipulation. With your dominant hand, pinch an amount of frosting that will fit in your hand against the piping tip, twist 2-3 times to separate it from the larger portion, and place that twist in the same spot at the base of your thumb, also pinching tightly. Squeeze only the smaller section in your dominant hand; it takes less force, is easier to control, and is significantly less likely to leak out the top of the bag. Using that small bulb as the primary bag and the rest of it as a kind of "refill section," use the tip as a Sharpie in the hands of a toddler - at an odd angle, in a fist, and what is done cannot be undone. Different tips can handle different amounts of pressure and sizes of twist-off point; with time, you'll get a feel for how to work them most efficiently for you. Only in cases of very, very wide tips (such as base icers and certain cupcake tips) should you even consider not using this method; it is acceptable to simply use your dominant hand to guide the tip, still holding the twist-tie tightly with your off hand, and squeezing very gently with both.

In the event of catastrophe when there is icing outside the bag that shouldn't be there, stop squeezing immediately and assess the situation. A bag with a puncture or a seam rip can be patched with duct or box tape for a short time, but should not be refilled and must be used with care until they're done. A bag that has popped the twist tie on the open end can in most cases simply get another twist tie... and hold it better next time, it's not supposed to do that. A bag with a coupler where only the ring or metal tip has developed an issue, check that the coupler and ring are well-fit, properly threaded, and not cracked. A bag where the whole tip has popped out needs to be transferred to another bag, there's no fixing that, but in most cases the old bag can be squeezed directly into the new bag with minimal casualties.