While the cooking shows one after the other on television, the desire to bake is sometimes neglected by the media. Homemade cakes, muffins and bread have been all the rage for years.
The best tips and tricks for a well-organized kitchen can be found here! (Scroll down to the article.)
Baking is a sensual affair. How wonderful when you open the oven door and the scent of fresh pastries wafts towards you! So that you can enjoy this wonderful hobby even more carefree, there are a few practical tricks that should no longer be withheld from you:
1. Climbing dough
It’s like the door that you pull and pull until someone tells you there is a “PRESS” sign on it. If your dough keeps climbing up the dough hook of the hand mixer, swap the hooks – then the “Archimedean screw” turns downwards. Most of the time the hooks are marked accordingly.
If you are generally bothered by the fact that the dough sticks to the dough hook, coat it with cooking oil beforehand.
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2. Ornate border
With simple kitchen utensils such as corkscrews, forks and spoons, elegant decorations can be pressed into the edge of the cake.
3. Dental floss knife
Cutting the sponge base for a cake is completely problem-free with tasteless dental floss. First put a toothpick all around at the same height in the biscuit. Then loop the floss around the biscuit and pull it together.
The trick is also useful for slicing Swiss rolls without crushing the tender pastries.
4. Sticky hands
There are two old tricks to prevent the dough from sticking to the hand and fingers when kneading: Firstly, it helps to flour your hands. If you fear that the dough will become too dry as a result, you should wet your hands with cooking oil.
5. Fishing for eggshells
Lost eggshells can be easily fished out of slippery egg white if you wet your fingers beforehand. You can find out in this video how you can tell whether the egg is still good.
6. Roll out the dough
If the shortcrust pastry sticks or cracks constantly when you roll it out, you should place cling film between it and the rolling pin.
7. Cupcake
If you find that you accidentally have too little dough while rolling out, you can use aluminum foil to make your baking sheet smaller. Even if there are fewer guests, this is an effective method – for example for the apricot and bee cake.
8. Even muffins
Fun for perfectionists: To get muffins of the same size, use an ice cream scoop to pour the batter into the molds. You can get regular cookies with a coffee measuring spoon.
9. Spreadable butter
With yeast dough in particular, it is important to process the ingredients at room temperature. You can soften the butter with a glass bowl: fill the bowl with hot water, and as soon as the bowl is warm, pour the water out and put the bowl over the butter for 5 minutes (you can watch the trick in the video here).
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10. Let the pizza dough rise faster
To make the pizza dough rise quickly and well, preheat the oven to 50 ° C while kneading. Before you put the dough in the oven to proof, turn it off and let it cool down briefly to around 40 ° C. Cover the dough with a damp tea towel.
Extra tips: Let the rolled-out pizza dough rise again for 15 minutes before you top it. With a pizza stone, the base becomes wonderfully crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside – perfect if you want to surprise your guests with a balloon pizza, for example. Connoisseurs also like to add a shot of beer to the batter!
11. Pizza dough without yeast
If you have to go faster, you can also make pizza without yeast. For this you need 280 g flour, 1 packet of baking powder, 240 ml milk, 60 g butter and a little salt. The dough is kneaded, rolled out, covered and baked at 230 ° C for 10 minutes.
12. Homemade piping tips
Not only for the cake decoration, also for cream puffs you can easily make a piping nozzle from a freezer bag. Simply cut off one of the lower corners, that’s it.
13. Separate egg yolks
If you forgot to separate the yolks, you can do that with an empty plastic bottle. Squeeze the bottle belly together, hold the bottle opening against the egg yolk and let go of the bottle belly again. This creates a vacuum that sucks the egg yolk into the bottle.
14. Chop the cold butter
With shortcrust pastry, the butter must be cold. In order to still be able to process the dough, the hard butter is chopped up with a chopper. With small amounts of dough, you can chop all the ingredients together.
15. Rolling pin substitute
If the rolling pin is missing, you can roll out the dough with a wine bottle. This is also useful if you want to roll out the dough directly on the baking sheet, but the edge is too high for the rolling pin.
16. Bread in a flower pot
Next time bake your bread in a flower pot. Grease the (clean) clay pot, then bake the dough in the oven as normal. The dough can rise nicely through the clay pot and the crust becomes wonderfully crispy. If the flower pot has a hole in the bottom, cover it with baking paper.
17. Bread from the pan
Fresh, home-baked bread for breakfast – there is hardly anything better. You can do this without getting up early. Mix 300 g flour, 150 ml water, 1 teaspoon dry yeast, 1 teaspoon sugar and 1 teaspoon salt to form a sticky dough. Grease a pan and let the batter rise overnight with the lid closed. The next morning, the dough is baked on a low level for 15 minutes with the lid closed, turned and baked for another 5 minutes.
18. Pancakes with soda
Whether classic or as a cinnamon roll: pancake batter becomes light and airy when you add carbonated mineral water to the batter.
19. Cut the cake
Before cutting, hold your knife under hot water and dry it off. The warm knife glides smoothly through the cake and the pieces look better.
20. Forgotten baking time
Did you forget when you put the cake in the oven? If you’ve been on the Internet afterwards, you’re in luck: Look at the browser history, there are the times when you visited which page. If there is a larger gap, that was probably the time you prepared the cake.
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Big baking can begin with these tricks. You will find tips and ideas with which you can bake like a real professional in the following articles. Enojy your meal!
Source: chef, brigitte
Thumbnails: © MediaPartisans © Pinterest / Judy Carman