Love/Hate Relationships

Ok..................so this morning did not start out as well as it could have.  One of the cakes that I am bring to the competition in VA has stacked fine line piping on the top of it (I know there's a technical name for it, but it escapes my brain at the moment).  Well....while looking for the cross-stitch patterns I drew for the other cake, I went to pick up the cake with the piping on it, without really looking at what I was doing (can you see where this is heading??).  Yup, you guess it, now I have to pipe one series of the lines all over again - damn thumb!!!  Ah well, stuff happens and the second piping will probably look better than the first.  This is an attempt to not get all riled up about it, hopefully it works (we'll see, since I'm typing this pretty soon after it happened and am going to finish the blog entry later).

Ok, so that was not the disaster I envisioned.  It was actually a pretty easy fix (woohoo!!!!).  I also finished piping all the cross-stitch that I needed to do, as well as attaching them to the cakes.  I have to say, cross-stitching in icing is pretty fun............once you figure out the correct consistency of your icing, lol.  But boy, does it use bags!!  I had 12 colors - that's 12 bags.  Disposable bags no less.

Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking "why didn't she just use parchment bags?"  Well, I'll tell ya, it's like this.  I have a love/hate relationship with parchment bags.  I love to hate them.  I want to like using them, but I just don't (a lot like soup...I want to love soup but I don't).  You see, I can make a parchment bag, I can even make one tight enough it doesn't have a hole at the bottom.  The problem come when I try to pipe with the bag.  Icing oozes out around the tip I'm using (highly annoying), and I can't seem to find a good way to fold down the bag.  Plus, it doesn't feel comfortable in my hand to pipe.  Part of the issue is that I love couplers.  I use them in every bag, every time.  I'm always wanting to try a different tip or something like that.  I've tried piping bags without couplers, and it's not a pretty sight.  I get all skeeved out and can't pipe (sadly, there have been witnesses to this).  Yes, I'm whacko.  You would have figured that out sooner or later even if I hadn't told you, lol.  I never thought I had OCD tendencies, however, my ever faithful sidekick, Janet, helpfully points them out to me when she see's them (and is usually laughing at me when she does) :D

If anyone has any ideas, tips, on how I can try to overcome my hatred for parchment bags, I'd love to see them!  It would save so many plastic bags if I could use parchment for some of it.  I do actually own parchment bags (I know, crazy!).  In fact, I own TWO boxes of them (that's 200 if anyone is counting)!  See, I've had a box since I took the Wilton classes as my craft store (like a good little student, I bought just about everything that was recommended).  Well, I needed a parchment bag for some cookies I was decorating (I needed 4 dots of icing).  I went to get a parchment bag, and lo and behold I CAN'T FIND THEM!!  It just about killed me to go to the store and buy another box.  Only to find the ones I already had AFTER I opened and used some from the new box.  I know own a lifetime supply of parchment bags!



Is there anything you wish you liked, that you don't?