Layer cakes are notoriously difficult to slice and serve if you want to keep the slices looking their best. After the cake has been sliced, you typically need to slide a small spatula or even a pie server underneath the wedge of cake and try to transfer it to a waiting dessert plate. The multi-layer slices of cake often shift around, needing to be held in place with a steadying finger or two, or land on their sides when they tip over after being pushed off the spatula. Unless a cooking show is being filmed in your home (or you’re a food blogger who takes a lot of photos!), it’s not critical to ensure that every slice of that cake looks perfect – but I know that when I spend a lot of time and effort decorating a cake, I want every piece to look as good as possible. This is where The Cake Knife might come in handy.
This knife is made of an unusual type of resin (Ultem, which is often used in making medical instruments and is actually used to make some guitar picks, as well), which is nonstick, as well as heat and stain resistant. It has a wide, flat blade that is just 4.75 inches long and 3 inches high- an ideal size for cutting into 8 and 9-inch round layer cakes. In short, the knife can slice through a two l or three ayer cake without getting cake stuck all over the blade, then you can use the large, flat blade of the knife to lift that slice easily onto a waiting plate.
A freshly baked fruit pie, full of tender apples or juicy berries, is one of the most delicious things that you can pull out of your oven. Unfortunately, when you are baking a fruit pie, you are often left with drips and splatters of fruit juice and filling that have bubbled over the edges of your pie pastry. My solution to this is to place a sheet of aluminum foil on top of the baking rack to catch the drips. The foil typically gets stuck to the bottom of the pie plate with this method, but it is effective and it is much easier to throw out the foil than to scrub filling out of the bottom of the oven.
It turns out that there is a baking gadget out there that is designed specifically to combat the problem of fruit pie filling running over and getting stuck on the bottom of your oven. The Nifty Pie Baking Combo Rack has a circular drip pan topped with a chrome-plated cooling rack. The pie is placed right on the rack before going into the oven, and after baking, the same rack doubles as a pie-shaped cooling rack for your pie. The designers of the rack say that it helps pies bake more evenly (although if you have a standard oven rack there should be plenty of circulation around a pie even without this rack) and it has plenty of reviews from very happy covers. For a pie baker, it might be worth a look, and it might make a good gift for a bakery in your life who specializes in pies.
Not every dessert we make is going to be served in our own kitchens. Cookies are packed up and bundled off to bake sales and tucked into school lunches. Cakes and cupcakes are carefully placed in cake carriers to be delivered to parties, potlucks and other celebrations. Delivering a cake in one piece isn’t necessarily that difficult – especially if you’re a careful driver – but it is nice to have a little bit of help to make sure the cake looks as good when you get there as it did when you left your house with it. One obstacle you’ll face when transporting a cake is heat, especially in the summer and early fall when the temperatures can be very warm.
Cake frostings and fillings are sensitive to heat and can melt or sweat easily. Cheesecakes also need to be kept cold. A big insulated bag full of ice packs will help cool your cake even if the outside temperatures (and the temps in your care) are very high, as will a large cooler, but these aren’t necessarily the most practical things to keep in your car. The ThermwWare Cool & Carry Food Carrier is another, somewhat more convenient option. This cake carrier has ice packs that tuck into its base. Freeze then in advance and your cake will have an extra layer of protection against the heat when traveling. It is not going to keep an ice cream cake frozen for hours before serving, but it will definitely help keep things cool when you’re going to an outdoor picnic on a warm day. The carrier can also be used to store fruit salad or other dishes that might need to stay a little cooler if you’re not using it for cake.
Although the weather in all parts of the country might not reflect it at the moment, fall will be here before we know it with color-changing leaves, cool evenings and plenty of excuses to bake spice cake and pumpkin pie. Another thing that might give you an excuse to make some spice cake is the new Autumn Cakelet Pan. The pan bakes 16 small cakes in the shapes of acorns, pumpkins, autumn leaves and turkeys. I actually really the mix of designs because, not only are they all very appropriate for fall, but it is easy to use just a few of the cavities at a time to get a whole set of matching cakes for Halloween (pumpkins) or for Thanksgiving (turkeys). The cakelets are a bit larger than some similar designs I’ve seen in previous years, so the shapes and details will be clearer in the finished cakes.
As the pan is manufactured by Nordic Ware, it is made of heavy duty cast aluminum and the pan is thick and durable enough to allow you to fill only the cavities that you want to use if you do want to make a matching set (just remove the cakes and allow pan to cool before refilling, if you’re not going to use all the shapes at once). The pan also has a nonstick coating that should make the cakes easy to remove. I’ve generally had very good results with the release even on very detailed pans from Nordic Ware, so the designs on the cakelets should come out clearly and make the little cakes easy to decorate.
I haven’t had the urge to make my own comic book in some time – but I will admit that as a kid I spent countless hours (usually on family trips) illustrating my own comic series in journals and notebooks. I actually preferred to make my own rather than read other people’s comics, though looking back I would put money on the fact that my stories, given that I was still in grade school, were far from anything that would have attracted a group of fans at Comic-Con. When I saw a display set up with these Spider-Man Comic Book Cookie Cutters at Williams Sonoma, I was intrigued because of the level of detail on the cookies. But the cookie cutter set has an ingenious design that allows you to make your own comic books (well, the covers at least) on a cookie canvas in your own kitchen.
The cookie cutter set comes with a double sided rectangular cutter, that both cuts out the shape of the comics and stamps the cut-out with an authentic logo that says “The Amazing Spiderman.” It also comes with a variety of spidey-shapes – from villains to speech bubbles – that you can use to customize your covers by stamping them into the frame. Be sure to use a good butter cookie dough so that the dough doesn’t spread out during baking (this Best Butter Cookie recipe works well, and I add a few tablespoons of extra flour for a drier dough that really holds its shape), or you’ll loose a little clarity on the design. If you don’t want all Spiderman cookies, use other cookie cutters as stamps and keep the speech bubble stamps to keep the comic look. Once the cookies are cool, you can decorate them.
I suspect that these comics also have a big advantage over those I drew as a kid. Not only are the designs sharp and professional looking, but they’re edible and should be very tasty, too. Decorating might take a little practice, but small icing tips, a steady hand and a little patience will help your comic books come out looking like the real deal.
