Sometimes, you can do something one way for years and then suddenly discover a way to do it better. If you want to save yourself work in the kitchen without sacrificing taste, you will love this post with foolproof baking hacks that I want to share.
Meringue pies are something that can be tricky to slice without messing up your knife and the appearance of the pie. However, you’ll have a cleaner cut as you slice through that meringue if you lightly butter both sides of the knife first.
Don’t you hate covering a meringue pie with waxed paper only to have the paper lifting meringue later? To end this problem, rub a little butter or margarine over the wax paper first before covering and no more sticky mess and ugly pie.
No one appreciates limp meringue. To give it more height and stiffness, you can use about 1/4 teaspoon of salt or one teaspoon of a cornstarch to the sugar before beating the ingredients.
Have you noticed when making butter cream frostings with confectioners’ sugar that it can become hard? Believe it or not, another of these cooking hacks that can solve this problem is by adding just a pinch of baking soda to those frosting ingredients before beating.
Rolling out cookies that you plan to cut often calls for flouring the surface in order to cut into shapes, which makes the dough workable. Yet, flour can often make the cookies heavier than you want. Therefore, try sprinkling the table or surface with some confectioners’ sugar instead. The result is better and more tender cookies.
If you ever had a cake that looked good when you took it out of the oven only to fall when cooled, then there are a few possibilities. You might have used extra large eggs. It may sound strange, but this size egg can hold more liquid to affect the outcome of your recipe. Large eggs are a better choice to stick with.
Another explanation for why your cake may fall is over mixing the batter. The reason is you incorporated too much air. Instead, gently mix in the ingredients slowly starting with milk and alternating with the dry ingredients to finish and fold in with the milk last. This method also gives a more tender crumb.
Maybe your cake fell because of oven temperature because you kept checking on the cake’s progress. Those slight changes in temperature can be all it takes for it to fall.
Whipping cream can take some time. However, to speed up the task you should always chill the bowl that you plan to use and your beaters. You might be shocked at the amount of time you can will save trying this technique.
Before you start beating that whipped cream, you also might try another of these cooking hacks by adding a few drops of lemon juice. This helps further to speed up beating and add to the quality.
Sticky ingredients like molasses, honey or other syrups can be hard to get out of your measuring cup. Another of these cooking hacks that will save you headaches is adding just a pinch of oil or measuring the oil if a part of the recipe to lubricate the cup first will have those ingredients sliding out easily.
What else I do when measuring oil is later emptying the measuring cup on my baking pan, which saves me from greasing it. I do this all the time.
These are just some of my other favorite hacks for baking that simplify my life. In fact, you may also want to try a few other kitchen shortcuts, kitchen tips and another post on baking substitutions that I rely on.
