hi I'm des de Wilson I'm going to show you how to make a parchment cone this is a really handy thing to know how to make I use them all the time when I'm decorating cakes when I'm writing happy birthday or congratulations on top of a decorated cake you don't have to own a pastry bag or a tip they're disposable there's all sorts of reasons why you should know how to make one the problem is when you read directions in a book it sounds really confusing so this is a perfect thing for you to see how to make so what we need to start with is a triangle of parchment they can see this is pretty flat a lot of parchment you will find in the supermarket next to the aluminum foil it'll come on rolls and so it'll have a natural curl to it just pull out a nice big piece and put it between some cookie sheets overnight so you flatten it out better go to your local bakery like I do and ask them if you can buy a stack of large flat sheets and then cut out a triangle it doesn't really matter what size but you don't want to make it too small and you don't want to make it too big so you can sort of see what this is and I'd go with this I had one made this is what we're making now it may seem counterintuitive that the point of the cone is actually going to come from the flat side of the parchment the center of the flat side but it is and if you just remember that that that's where you start then all the steps will fall into place so take your finger put it in the center of the long side of the parchment and then take this corner curl it up see how the part have a cone shape is already starting to take shape now I'm going to shuffle my hands around a little bit don't get confused all I'm gonna do is bring this point up to there just from the other angle to make it easier for me there we go now look at this looking like a cone but can you see how the tip is open if I pour it melt a chocolate in there right now it would flow right out we want to tighten that up and the way to do that is to take this end and we sort of jiggle the corners these pieces there's three corners here now look how nice and tight that is and that was just from manipulating the paper you just jiggled it back and forth until it gets nice and tight okay now you have a choice you can either put a little piece of tape but if you don't have tape in the kitchen I don't always have it handy what I do is I just fold it back and I make a little knot and then I just tuck the notch in or out and there's your cone okay I'm gonna show you from another perspective from my perspective this is what I see when I do it thumb on the center of the long side take this corner bring it up to here now I'm gonna flip it around take this corner goes back and around and up to the back and then see big big hole we have to jiggle these three on this end there we go nice and tight look at that no melted chocolates gonna fall through there so no tape no problem fold it over flip a little notch tuck the notch and there we have it parchment cone now I'm gonna go melt some chocolate and then I'll show you how to use our parchment cone my chocolate is nice and melted now I want you to notice something you see you can still see some of the shapes of the pieces of chocolate that's because when you melt chocolate you really only want to melt it about 3/4 of the way and then you can stir it and the residual heat will melt it the reason why I waited to the last minute to melt the chocolate is because it'll be super smooth and we won't have any little pieces that might get clogged in the parchment cone when we cut the tip now here I have a this is a measuring cup you can use any kind of a glass it's really handy usually there's no one else in the kitchen to help me so I'll put my parchment cone in a container like this to hold it upright and that way I can scrape the melted chocolate in it you could also of course use frosting at this point or something else that semi-liquid that you want to decorate your cake with but I think I think a good 90% of the time when I use parchment cones it's with melted chocolate so just like with a pastry bag you don't want to overfill so I'm just gonna pour in well you know about a third of the way up nice and smooth and then we're gonna close the top again this part isn't scientific just get the top closed now this you can there's a tiny little droplet coming out that's okay now here I have a pan this is a really great tip this is an 8 inch pan let's say I baked an 8 inch birthday cake and that's what I want to decorate on the top I don't know about you but have you ever tried to write congratulate congratulations but you don't get all the way across because your letters are too big and you get to the L or the A or whatever you've run out of space on the cake that's happened to me so what you want to do is you want to take the cake pan that you baked your cake in turn it upside down this obviously is the same diameter as your cake and this way you can practice so we need a scissors and we're just gonna cut a really small little tip little hole off of the tip you can always make it big later on there it's flowing beautiful so let's see let's go for happy birthday it's flowing nice and smoothly the other thing when you're melting chocolate this is a couverture chocolate this is not chocolate chips that I melted down this is a really nice Valrhona chocolate equitorial it's 55% it's my favorite go-to semi-sweet chocolate and it has such a nice percentage high percentage of cocoa butter that it's super smooth and so when you're doing something like this where it's real important that you have very smooth chocolate it pays to use good chocolate actually it always pays to use a good chocolate help see what happened well there we go thought we had a lump but we didn't just had it to add a little more pressure there we go not bad for a first time but as you can see then you can just scrape it off practice again it's a really really helpful tip so that's how you make a parchment cone I hope that you'll consider using these and making these in your kitchen when you're decorating a cake and melted chocolate is involved I say it's your go-to tool thanks for tuning in and check out some of our other videos at de de Wilson com