There is nothing sweeter than the smell of home baked goods spreading throughout your house. The candied air, thick with powdered sugar, and the delicate spice of cinnamon give you a warm, fuzzy feeling – and make your stomach rumble!
Photo: Bakes & Kropp Fine Cabinetry – Maid Sailors Home Cleaning
Baking is often presented as a scientific process with many variables that could negatively affect the outcome. Many people struggle to perfect their cakes, cookies, and pastries in their kitchens. We all know the old saying, ‘a good workman never blames his tools’. When it comes to baking, however, it could be your environment and equipment that are causing all your cakes to collapse and your cookies to melt into buttery puddles!
If you’re keen to get your baking groove on, here are 5 brilliant ways to make your beautiful kitchen more baking-friendly.
1. Change your countertops
We’ve all been there. No matter how much flour you dust onto your countertop, your dough will just not stop sticking! The surface you’re working on can either make it easier or harder to make your baked goods. If only you had a better kitchen…If you plan to experiment with pastry and bread-making in particular, you should really think about the material your work surface is made of.
Marble, whilst quite pricey, is praised highly for pastry-making in particular as it keeps cool and makes it easy to roll out your pastry dough for laminating. If you can’t afford to resurface all of your counters, you could source a large block of your chosen material to place on top of your original counter when you need it.
Pick a material that is easy to clean too, as you’ll likely be making a lot of mess while you’re in baking mode!
2. Pretty pantry
Your pantry holds the key to a world of experimental baking. To make your kitchen more baking-friendly, you absolutely must have a well thought-out pantry storage system in place. Baking ventures often flop when you use poor quality ingredients. We’re all guilty of impulsively purchasing quirky flours or bulk-buying ingredients on sale. If you don’t keep track of what you have and when it expires, you might end up with a cake that is tasteless and flat as a pancake!
Organising the contents of your pantry into categories will make it easy for you to grab and go when you’re in a hurry to whip something up. Employing handy storage solutions like lazy susans or basket containers will help keep ingredient categories together.
3. Upgrade your equipment
The last thing you want after spending an afternoon mixing dough, chilling it for a few hours, and carefully cutting it into delicate shapes, is for your cookies to stick to a grimey cookie sheet, never to be tasted. Make your kitchen baking-friendly by filling your cupboards with good quality equipment that covers you for all your potential baking needs.
If you make a rocking banana bread, make sure you have a sturdy loaf tin. Maybe you make exquisite cupcakes with the most delicious buttercream frosting – carry a decent cupcake tin, cupcake liners, and quality piping bags!
Your cupboards should include all the basic baking essentials like a mixing bowl or two, spatula, whisk, knives, and baking pans. The best baked goods are never the result of makeshift cake tins formed out of other cooking materials you have on hand.
4. Pay attention to your appliances
Crucial to moist and chewy baked goods is a good-functioning oven. If your oven is dirty, the smell of caked on grease will permeate into your cakes – yuck! The grime might also affect the temperature control which will affect the timings and rise of your baked goods.
You should carry out a monthly oven clean to keep it in ship shape for baking. This doesn’t need to be difficult and you don’t need to use toxic chemicals to scrape the gunge off either.
Simply make a paste out of bicarbonate of soda and water and lather the inside of your oven with it. Shut the door and leave it overnight. The next day, return with a spray bottle of vinegar and a sturdy cloth or sponge for scrubbing. Spray vinegar on a patch of paste and watch it fizz and dissolve. Start scrubbing it off and at the end you’ll be left with a lovely shiny oven – free of odours!
5. Easy cleaning
When you’re baking, it can be easy to become overwhelmed by the number of ingredients you have spilling out over your counter and the growing pile of equipment in your sink, waiting to be washed. Cleaning up is an inevitable part of baking so make it easy for yourself.
Install a taller faucet at your kitchen sink to make it easier to pile bulkier cooking equipment in. It’s a pain to clean large mixing bowls in a tiny sink, so this will give you a lot of extra space to work with. Always have a supply of clean cloths and surface spray at the ready to wipe down your surface at regular intervals during the baking process.
Get your bake on!
These 5 tips will make your kitchen more baking-friendly, removing the uncertainty about what your final cake will look and taste like. Making sure you have fresh ingredients and a clean and functional work environment will make the process more enjoyable and far easier!