I’ll have one of my biggest challenges in life this year. I am looking for all kind of tips and things useful in kitchen. Or things useful when you want to do something that could cause a mess in your kitchen. Or tips to refresh the food, or to give it a new commercial face. There are some interesting tips on Internet and I’ve tried to select some of them 🙂
- We have a soft cake and we want to cut it in layers. Try the following method and you will have 2 perfect layers, and the cake won’t break anymore: put some toothpicks in the middle of the cake (to mark the place where you want to cut). You have to put them all around. I don’t know how many toothpicks, depends on the cake size. Then hold the unscented dental floss tightly between two fingers and bear down with just a bit of pressure; the floss will slice cleanly all the cake surface. That’s it 🙂
- The dental floss can be used for cutting the butter in case you have forgotten to take it out of the fridge. You can use the floss to cut delicate cakes with a more fluffy consistency, such as roll up cakes, sponge cakes, etc.
- To peel the ginger is always hard work. Do you know how simple is? Using the edge of a teaspoon. Yes, exactly, use a teaspoon, instead of a knife, and peel the ginger. There is no chance to cut your fingers and it takes a few seconds. That’s it 🙂
- Do you know how could you make the simplest pancakes? You have to use all the ingredients necessary for pancakes (eggs, milk, flour – there are many recipes), put them in a plastic bottle of normal size, let a little space inside for mixing. Put the stopper and shake it vigorously. And that’s it. The pancakes are ready 🙂 Shake baby, shake! 🙂
The same method is used for milk foam. For example, for a cappuccino, we use a glass container (for example a jar), and we put 1/3 milk, shake it vigorously. Then, we remove the lid and we leave the jar for 30 seconds at the microwave. In this way we can have a great foam for our cappuccino.
- The parchment paper has usually a rectangle or square shape. But what can we do if we have a circle-shaped pan? We can make an almost perfect circle shaped parchment in just a few quick steps: fold the parchment in half (everything will happen at the half of the paper), then fold it again, it results a square. Then, fold the square on its diagonal and it results a triangle. We’ll fold this triangle in half again from left to right to make a smaller triangle. Hold the triangle against the pan. Find the corner of the triangle where the center of the paper will be once it’s unfolded. This is the center point. Place this corner in the middle of the cake pan and hold the parchment right where it hits the edge of the pan. Cut the parchment
where you are holding it, trim the triangle about ¼ inch in from the edge of the pan. You will cut round exactly the shape of your pan. Unfold the parchment and it results a perfect round.
- How to soften and restore your sugar when it is a one rock hard mass? An efficient method to soften it quickly and to use it again is the following: use a paper towel (that type we use in the kitchen) and keep it 20 seconds into the microwave. It won’t be perfectly in its original state but it can be used easily. Don’t let it more than 20 seconds, it’s degrading.
- How to use the electric mixer without making a mess in the kitchen. There is a very good idea (I like it very much since I discovered it): take a plastic plate or lid that is bigger than your mixer bowl diameter, place it on top of the bowl and cut 2 holes so that the mechanism has enough space to circulate while mixing. You will need to put the attachment through the holes and then attach in to the mixer. Place the plate with its bottom up. Try it once and you will thank me. No drop of your composition will be scattered out of the bowl. Everything will stop on the plastic plate 🙂
- How can you refresh a cake (for example: the brownies)? I like using tart pans and cupcake muffin round cups, or muffin pans. I like small-shaped cakes, they can be eaten by hand, and their content do not dry out. But if it happens to have dried brownies or muffins, there is a simple method to refresh them quickly: we put them in the baking pan or in the cups. Then we take some marshmallows, we slice them in small pieces, each one having 1/3 of the muffin size. We put one slice of marshmallow on each muffin and then we let them for about 5-7 minutes into the oven at a temperature of 180 degrees. They will be delicious, soften, and they will look like having egg whites on top of them. Your guests will think you’ve cooked another cake and you will receive appreciations 🙂
That’s all for today. I hope this article will help you in kitchen. Other tips coming soon. Making a movie with all these tips could be more interesting and suggestive. But I like writing and maybe a solution will be to mix both of them: writing and filming.
Follow me. Other surprises will come soon. Good luck to all of you! 🙂