There are alot of jobs in various recipes where having a piping bag to hand, if you haven’t already got one, gives great results.  Alot of cooks, you will see come up very quickly with a greasedproof paper piping bag.  Which I do on alot of occassions.

By simple rolling a piece of greasedproof paper around your hand to make a funnel shape (as shown on the right) and filling this with the mixture at hand you wish to pipe, fold over the top of the paper once full and then simply snip off the bottom of the funnel and pipe away.

A brilliant and quick way ‘if your good at origami!’, I can hear my friend Claire say. ‘But my piping bag always turns out like a square flat purse and when I snip off the end, its everywhere literally’. We always have a laugh at this. But sometimes we take for granted, what is easy to one person is not so simple to someone else. So make sure you have a piping bag and nozzles to hand which you can use over and over again for all tasks and piping designs to create some terrific effects.

I use both, and tend to use the greaseproof paper when writing icing on cakes & desserts for instance, along with decorating the top of my bakewell tarts, when I want a specific detail. All I do is to cut the smallest of tips off my homemade piping bag, which is where alot of people go wrong by snipping off an enormous portion.

So a piping kit, Kaiser bakeware patisserie piping bag set with nozzles containing 3 shaped nozzles, 1 adapter and 1 piping bag for £12.70 is an essential piece of baking kit.   This reusable plastic-coated cotton piping bag can be washed over and over again and with its sturdy plastic nozzles which are all dishwasher safe too.

You can use these to do many piping jobs like: pipe mash onto a cottage pie, decorate a celebration cake, pipe different shape biscuits, make icing flowers to decorate baking, pipe butter icing etc on the baking, pipe cream onto the top of your trifle, pipe cream into buns of various types, pipe choux buns etc, the list is endless. So make sure you have one handy in your kitchen.

Why not send us some of your piping tips?