How to Fill & Secure a Piping Bag

Hey everyone, I'm Rachel Teufel. I own Intricate Icings Cake Design in Denver, Colorado, and I'm excited to be able to share a handful of my tips and tricks with you. Today, I'm going to show you how to fill a piping bag and make it super simple and easy and no hassle or mess. Let's head into the kitchen and fill up those piping bags. I'd like to show you how to fill a piping bag. And depending upon the size piping bag that you're working with, there are a couple of methods that might work better than some others. So the first one that I wanna show you is just your small piping bag. And this one happens to have a coupler and a tip that part doesn't really matter compared to not having a coupler, when you're filling your bag, that piece is not important. But the first way that you can do it is just by folding your bag in half. And I like to open it back up just so you know, go ahead and get in there so that you could open it up. And it's about halfway, it's not perfect, but it's about halfway. And then you just want to make a C with your hand, and then you can use your buttercream and your spatulas to fill the bag. If that's a little cumbersome, is sometimes it's a little hard to manage all of these different pieces at one time, you can actually just use a glass. This is just a standard drinking glass, but if you start with your bag, you just want to drop the tip down inside and I will scrunch it up just a little bit, because we want to get more of that bag inside and then just use your fingers to pull the bag over the glass. And then again, just open it back up inside to create that space in there for your icing. What's nice about this is it allows you, both hands, to be able to hold your bowl with your buttercream or whatever you're using, royal icing, piping gel chocolate, and you can use you just being able to use both hands it just makes things a little bit easier, kind of frees things up a little bit. And then once you have the amount of icing that you need, I don't recommend filling it up too far. Otherwise your icing has a chance to come back out of the bag, but there's definitely room here to go a little further, you could fill up this whole portion. So about maybe half to two thirds, somewhere in that range, and then just using the side of your palm I just like to push my icing down towards the tip. And the reason for that is to just allow you the space here to be able to gather it and tie it off. So you just use your hands to kind of pinch it all together and give it a couple good twists. Now you could stop here and you could easily pipe with this particular bag just how it is. Although if you're gonna start and stop and set this bag down at all, then I would recommend tying it off. And you can do that either with a twist tie. And in this case, I like to wrap it all the way around once and then twist it on the other side. And you just want to be able to get those pieces secured, just so that as you're piping with your bag, all that buttercream doesn't come back out because the key for piping in general is that your icing comes forward and out the tip, meaning you want to be able to use your whole hand and palm to be able to squeeze without worrying about anything coming out the backside. So the twist tie is a really easy solution. They do also have, bag ties are what they're called in the store. And it's basically a rubber band with a little notch on it. And the way these work, again, just twist that bag. You're gonna pull the rubber band on the backside and then hook on the little clip, and then you just pull it taut. And again, this just stays nice and tight so that all of your buttercream doesn't come back out when you're piping, whatever it is that you're piping. So those are just two really easy ways to secure your piping bag and make sure that all of the effort that you're putting into squeezing your icing is going the right direction. Now that you know how to fill up your piping bag, it's time to start practicing some of those piping skills.