Tag Archives: piping

Performed Properly, This Exercise Should Not Hurt At All

The big Super Bowl XLV  is now history and now it’s time to get on with something more important:  cookie decorating.

And, it wouldn’t be cookie decorating without piping.  Lots and lots of piping.

The proper brandishing of a pastry bag was the skill I envied the most when I went to culinary school.  I wanted to master deftly choreographed wrist movements that, along with measured pressure on the bag itself, would make me the fiercest piping bag swashbuckler this side of the Mississippi.

Okay, so maybe I’m not the swashbuckler I thought I’d be.  BUT, in the endurance arena, I prevail.  I knock out the competition.  I rule.  Seriously.  I can write, dot, dash, outline, embellish and whatever else it is I do for hours upon hours without pain.  Without cramping.  Without arthritis medication.

How?  Here’s how:

• Make sure your icing is the proper consistency.  Remember that the smaller the tip you use, the looser your icing should be.  See how this is falling out of the bag?  I’m barely applying pressure to this bag.

• Make sure the bag is filled properly.  Fill the bag a little more than halfway, so you can gather and twist the empty top portion of the bag.

• Here’s my secret weapon.  Look at this photo.  See how the top of bag is folded and scrinched  (technical term of mine) down against the icing-filled portion of the bag?  That excess bag girth acts as a lever mechanism.  Extra pressure is applied without any real extra effort on your part.  Clever, eh?

• The squeeze itself.  Your fingers and thumb are not where the action starting point.  It’s your whole arm.  It’s your bicep.  Engage it and the energy will course down through your forearm into your hand and out through the piping bag.

If you experience pain or discomfort, review these tips again and again.  You’ll get it.  You’ll be piping all kinds of itty bitty details like these without stopping to shake your hand out every 5 minutes.  And without complaining.

The blindness that results from said itty bitty piping is another matter entirely.