10 Baking Hacks to Make Your Life a Breeze
Baking can be a delicate affair – especially when half a cup of butter could be the difference between a show-stopping cake and a kitchen disaster. So make your life a breeze with these 10 baking hacks carefully selected by us that’ll make you feel like the best baker in the neighbourhood!
1. Get icing sugar from regular sugar!
Time for the finishing touch of dusting icing sugar over your baked goods – but you only have regular sugar! Don’t worry, you can just use your regular sugar by putting it into a food processor and blending at high speed until they reach the consistency of powdered sugar.
Get the Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor for a portable and hassle-free appliance to do just that!
2. Juicy lemons in 10 seconds!
Need to get juices out from your citrus fruits as one of the ingredients? Instead of getting cramps squeezing them with your hands, simply pop them in the microwave for 5 to 10 seconds to get the juices flowing!
3. It just won’t come off!
Trying to add in honey or molasses into your baking mix but it just won’t come off your bowl or spoon? Just coat them with a non-stick cooking spray first! It’ll come right off and the ingredients you measured will be super precise!
4. Cut Perfect Slices of Brownies!
Always making a crumbly mess when cutting brownies? Run your knife under hot water for several seconds, dry it, and watch how cleanly your knife cuts through them! Pop them into your fridge to keep them fresh and re-heat your brownies when needed and you’ll be getting perfect slices of all your baked goods in no-time!
5. Make Instant Buttermilk!
If you want to make soft and fluffy pancakes, you’ve got to use buttermilk! Not many of us keep buttermilk readily available in our fridge, but here’s a hack to make instant buttermilk from just regular milk and lemon juice! Add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice (or vinegar) in a 1-cup measuring cup and fill the rest with milk. After letting it sit for 5 minutes, you’ve just got a fresh batch of buttermilk!
6. Have the hazelnuts peel itself for you!
It can be a nightmare getting the flaky skins off hazelnuts – especially when you are making some delicious homemade Nutella cream!
To make it a cinch, roast the hazelnuts in an oven until hot then place them in a damp kitchen towel and gently rub. The combination of heat and moisture will let the hazelnut peel itself for you!
7. Control the temperature of your eggs!
You are baking happily when the recipe suddenly calls for room temperature eggs – oops, guess who forgot to take out the eggs an hour beforehand? Fret not! You can regulate the temperature of your eggs back to room temperature by immersing them in a bowl of hot (but not boiling) water for 5 to 10 minutes!
8. Ripen Bananas Quickly!
Here’s a time-accelerating trick for those who want ripe bananas without the hassle of waiting for them to ripe naturally!
Place them on a baking sheet and bake them at 300°F for about 40 minutes – you’ll get perfectly ripe bananas for you to use in your delicious banana bread and cakes!
We recommend this Jamie Oliver Non-Stick Baking Sheet that is both sturdy and reliable!
9. Get perfectly flaky biscuits and crusts!
The key secret in getting those perfectly flaky biscuits and pie crusts is making sure pieces of butter are evenly distributed inside your dough. The best way to do this is to use a cheese grater and grate the butter into the dough for easy stirring!
The Boska Stainless Steel Trio Formaggio Cheese Grater is perfect for the job!
10. IG-Worthy Cakes with a Floss!
Ever wondered how pastry chefs achieve getting those perfectly sliced cakes in their photos? It’s simple! Get unscented dental floss from any local convenience store! A taut dental floss slides through soft and doughy items with much better precision than any standard kitchen knife!