My Wooden Spoon

Today’s tips will revolve around baking. I LOVE to bake but hate the clean up;)  BTW–I give tips every Tuesday!!

• If you like to use insulated baking sheets, don’t run out to the store to buy them; you can simulate them by stacking one regular cookie sheet over another. Be especially careful when you take them out of the oven; the top sheet should be removed first.
• Bread Baking - Brush melted butter over the tops of breads and biscuits as soon as they are removed from the oven. This will make the crust soft and full of flavor.
• Freeze stale bread and then make croutons. Toast the bread first until it is crispy. Brush the bread slices with melted butter and sprinkle on garlic or onion powder, or your favorite herb blend. Then cut the bread into small cubes for croutons.
• Use an ice cream scoop to drop cookie dough. Your cookies will be uniform size and will bake evenly. If the dough is sticky, dip the scoop into water between scoops.
• Remove baked brownies from the pan and frost them upside down. They will cut easily into squares.
• Almost any quick bread can also be used to make muffins. Instead of making the bread into loaves, just put the batter into muffin cups (spray first) and bake at a slightly higher (25?) temperature. You also need to bake them a shorter length of time than a loaf.
• Add a pinch of baking soda to your frosting and the frosting will stay moist and prevent cracking.
• Do you bake pies? Especially Meringue? To stop the meringue from shrinking away from the sides of the pies, be sure that when you put the meringue on top, you make sure it touches the pastry all around the edge. This way, it will bake onto the pastry and will not shrink!
• Baking Cakes? Do you have a recipe for cake flour, but you only have all purpose flour on hand? Take your all purpose flour and sift the flour about 5 times! There, now you have cake flour!

Finally, if you have leftover cookie dough be sure to enjoy eating every last bite of it!