How Bakery Pros Get Finicky Frosting Into The Tip Of Their Piping Bags

If you have spent any amount of time in the baking world, you know that the hardest part of the process isn't ensuring your cakes come out perfectly baked or getting the flavors just right — it's the decorating. Although your dessert may taste good, if it looks like it was decorated by a toddler, it loses some of its appeal. 

One of the trickiest parts of decorating a cake is, of course, filling the piping bags. They're a must-have for smoothly dispensing frosting onto a layer cake, making delicate royal icing designs on a cookie, or creating bakery-worthy cupcakes. If there are any trapped air bubbles in your bag, you'll risk the icing sputtering out the end, effectively ruining your design. To combat this, celebrity cake artist Kristina Lavallee, aka The Cake Girl, recommends pushing downward on the bag as you fill it to push out these air pockets. She says, "I like to fold the bag over my hand as I fill it with frosting and I press everything down towards the tip as I am filling." This gives more control over the bag and allows her to apply pressure and remove the air. Then she has one final move, saying, "Before I start icing a cake, I give the bag a test squeeze over a bowl to push out any trapped air and then I'm ready to go."

There are other ways to combat the air issue when filling piping bags, but not all of them work as effectively as celebrity cake artist Kristina Lavallee's method of choice. For one, you may have seen people tying and spinning their piping bags once they've filled them with icing in order to get the sugary frosting to flow down toward the tip, but this strategy is not all it's cracked up to be. When you spin the bag, you may be forcing the icing to flow toward the tip, but it may not be pushing the air out. "So sometimes the end result is not as good since air pockets develop that [affect] the piping process," says Lavallee. Some folks also recommended microwaving the frosting to remove air bubbles, but this puts you at imminent risk of melting the butter. 

Another tip that Lavallee offers is to push the icing into the bag with a spatula, which she says will give you a better result. If you struggle to hold the bag with one hand and fill it with the other, try fitting the bag into a Mason jar and securing it with a rubber band. You can use the spatula to not only put the icing in the bag, but also push some of the air out before you start piping.