Jeff Parker Cooks

This is (or at least should be) a quick posting that I have been meaning to get up for, oh, about 3 weeks now.  I had many requests since posting the Tie-Dyed Cake for Chloe as to how to get the color effect on the icing.  The technique I used is called bag striping. Bag striping can be accomplished a couple different ways. One is to use a spatula to place a couple similarly toned colored icings along the sides of a pastry bag.  This is best used with subtle color differences when piping flowers.  For vivid multiple color differences, like on Chloe’s cake, I used a brush striping technique.  The colors are more intense because the color is brushed into pastry bag.

When I did Chloe’s cake, I used a vinyl pastry bag and paste icing colors. The color stayed fairly intense while I piped the top of the cake and didn’t really start to fade until I got to the edge of the cake.  For this demo, I made a dozen cupcakes for Halloween using orange concentrated paste icing color and black gel paste color.  The gel color (black) faded quicker than the concentrated paste color (orange).  Also, I used disposable plastic piping bags so you could see the color.  However, the slickness of the plastic bags didn’t seem to hold the color as well the vinyl bag did.  Fine by me — I don’t like to use the disposable bags anyway because they hurt my hands after awhile plus, they’re not so great for the landfill.

Apply one or more stripes of the icing color with a small paint or decorating brush. In this case, I alternated three black stripes with three orange stripes. Fill the bag with white icing and as the icing is squeezed past the color(s), whatever you are piping will come out striped.

Okay, so it’s not the prettiest piping I’ve ever done… but you get the point!

Peace – J

Tags: bag striping, cake, cake decorating, Halloween, holiday