Essential Cake-Baking Tools
With so many stores and catalog companies claiming to be the place for cooking tools, it is easy to wonder whether the cost of these designer bakeware products is really necessary. The long and short answer is a resounding yes!
Purchasing professional and commercial-grade basics are worth the investment. They are built to last, constructed to insure even baking, and readily available at nearby stores and online. What you don't need are fancy tools you will only use once. While these gadgets are fun and tempting, you can improvise with something you already have in your kitchen and no one will know the difference.
Here is a list of the essential tools you'll need for baking cakes:
- Cake pans: Available in assorted shapes and sizes, purchase two pans the same size. Most cake recipes call for eight-inch pans, but that doesn't mean the pan has to be round! Cakes baked in square pans are easy to decorate and receive unexpected adulation
- Offset spatula: Thin and flexible, the offset spatula's stainless steel blade allows you to apply frosting smoothly across a cake's surface
- Silicon spoon spatula: This is the ideal tool for blending and folding ingredients or just scraping a bowl clean. Today most spatulas are made of silicon, so they won't crack, stain, or absorb flavors. The head of the spatula is removable for cleaning, and you can select from a range of colors, sizes, and shapes.
- Professional food coloring: Whether you select liquid, powder, or paste, professional food coloring offers an intense color palette for you to work with. When trying to decide what color food coloring to buy, remember you can easily mix colors to achieve the desired color and shade. Your basic selection should include the primary colors: red, yellow, blue, and black. From these, you can mix any other color you desire. In cake decorating, the base icing is your white paint.
- Pastry bag: There are many sizes and styles of pastry bags. Select a cloth bag lined with polyethylene. The interior plastic coating allows for easy cleaning, and the outside fabric never gets slippery
- Pastry tips: Often sold by the set, stainless-steel or plastic pastry tips can also be purchased separately. Basic sets include varying sizes of round and star-shaped tips, as well as tips used for basketweave, rose, and leaf decoration.
If you decide to purchase pastry bags and tips separately, you will also need a plastic coupler. The coupler is a two-piece unit that fits the pastry tip to the pastry bag.
Question:
Why don't cake layers line up at home as they do in bakeries?
Unlike the cake pans available to the home cook, professional cake pans have straight sides and reinforced rims. Commercial-quality cake pans are constructed of heavy-gauge aluminized steel to ensure even baking.
