Cake Decorating - Making a Decorating Cone with Parchment Paper

Sandy Sheppard: Hi! I am Sandy Sheppard, a master cake decorator, and today I am going to show you how to make a parchment -- take a parchment triangle and turn into a cone that you can use for decorating with. The first thing I do with the parchment triangle, as you notice it has three corners. Two long skinny ones and the short flat one. Lay it on the table or a flat surface in front of you, so that the flat one, the short point is pointing towards yourself. Now, I am right-handed, so I am going to reach the right corner first with my right hand and you can see I am holding it between two fingers, so that I can turn my hand and the cone comes with me. I will bring that first corner right up here to meet with the short flat corner. I have already; you can see its already forming that cone. I am going to hold it between my thumb and fingers, lift it in the air, and with my other hand grab that last corner and wrap it and pull it around. Now, I have got all three corners together. This is where a moist cloth comes in handy, something just to slightly moisten your fingers because you want to be able to feel that paper and move it a little, and you dont want it to slide out of your finger. The next step, I want to achieve a nice tight point down here, so I am going to very simply wiggle, great technical term wiggle, but I am just going to wiggle and shift it a little bit at a time, and it slowly shifts and now I have a very nice tight point, and all three layers of the parchment, you can see one, two, three are overlapped all the way down to the point. This is very important, because this is what helps keep the bag nice and strong, so that when you are working with it, the icing does not break through the side. If I had not pulled it together, if I have gotten a nice tight point, but I didnt have it overlapped all the way along, you can possibly see a shadow or see right through here, its not overlapped. Right there it would be very for that bag to break, because its only one layer of parchment instead of three. So, make sure when you do it, to tighten it nicely, so that you have a cone. Now, I would like to fold this cone down, so that I can use it. When I first started decorating I would take a piece of scotch tape and tape right along this scene and let that hold it in place. You could do that, if thats what makes you comfortable. Id like to take, and fold the three corners down, and I just run my thumbnails crossed it to keep that fold nice and tight. I make a little tear in the middle of all three layers, and then I fold one piece forward and once piece outward. There we go, we have a parchment cone ready to use, and fill with icing.