Most cooking can be done with a couple of pieces of simple equipment – a good sauce pan, a skillet, and a couple of decent mixing bowls. Baking, however, is a whole different ballgame. Whether you’re making a basic sheet cake or more intricate pastries, baking generally requires some more precision focused tools. If you’re just getting started, here’s five baking utensils that are key for making your baking experiments turn out great.
1. Cupcake and Muffin Pan – You really can’t undergo any kind of baking without having a trusty cupcake and muffin pan. Opt for an industrial grade aluminum and steel finish for a pan that won’t warp in heat and will hold up well through multiple bouts of baking.
2. Wooden Dowel – We can’t be the only people who find using a rolling pin difficult. If you’ve got a decent amount of dough to roll out, using a traditional rolling pin is a great way to wear yourself out. Instead, take a page out of the French way of rolling out dough – use a wooden dowel. They’re slimmer and easier to roll, making it a lot easier to roll out dough that’s a bit tough.
3. Offset Spatula – Most spatulas these days are made of plastic or silicone, but the offset spatula is one that breaks the mold. Instead of plastic, an offset spatula is a long and narrow baking utensil with a flat dull metal blade. In baking, it’s used to evenly spread icing on cakes and cupcakes, but it also can serve a ton of other purposes including scooping up hot cookies from a baking sheet to cool on another surface and moving a cake or other baked good from a pan to a plate.
4. Cookie Scoops – Cookie scoops aren’t really a necessary baking utensil, but they do make everything look prettier by keeping all of your cookies and other small baked goods nearly perfectly shaped and uniform. We like to also use them for chocolate truffles.
5. Metal Skewer – Metal skewers are great for lots of things – roasting marshmallows over an open flame, grilling kebabs, and also baking! To test cakes and cupcakes to make sure they’re fully cooked and not too gooey inside, most chefs stick a small metal skewer into the middle. If it comes out clean, it’s done, if it’s dirty, then it needs more time to bake. The benefit to using a metal skewer instead of a fork or knife is that the hole it makes is smaller, so it doesn’t mess up the look of your creation.
What are your go-to baking utensils? Have we left anything out? Do you have one baking tool that you couldn’t live without? Tell us about it in the comments!
