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The holiday season isn't just about baking--plenty of entertaining goes on, as well. The Snowy Village Cakelet Pan can help out with both. Using it, it's easy to turn out miniature cakes shaped like quaint cottages covered with festive greenery. Add a dusting of powdered sugar and you've got a snow-covered village that will look perfect in the middle of your holiday table. You don't need to take decorating any farther than that, although a few little touches of holiday color can make the village even cuter. Personally, I think that gingerbread makes for both the perfect appearance and smell for this holiday village, although the pan comes with a recipe. It can hold six cups of batter--one cup for each of the six buildings in the tiny village.
The Snowy Village Cakelet Pan is cast-aluminum, making for a very durable pan that will distribute heat evenly, baking your cakes perfectly. The pan has a nonstick finish, so that even the small architectural details on the buildings will release easily from the pan. While you should wash the pan by hand, it is easy to clean up. The Snowy Village Cakelet Pan is a limited-edition pan made by Nordic Ware and available through Williams-Sonoma for this holiday season. The pan is $36.
Going all out on baking for the holidays is a family tradition: we make cookies, cakes, and anything else we can think of, handing out treats to friends and family. Since I give them to a wide variety of people, I'm always looking for a way to make mine look their best. The Baking Shapes that King Arthur Flour is offering for the holiday season easily add a little something special to a plate full of holiday sweets. The set of four includes a pair of bells, a star, a snowman, and a tree. You can fill one with cake or muffin batter--much the same way that you make cupcakes, bake them, and turn them out.
The Baking Shapes each hold about a third of a cup of batter and turn out cakes ranging in size from 3.5 inches to 4.25 inches. Each of the four bakers is steel, with a nonstick coating. When you clean them, the Baking Shapes should be washed by hand. While the four shapes won't use up all the batter that most cake recipes will make, they can be combined with muffin tins to turn out several options you can easily serve for the holidays. The set of four Baking Shapes is priced at $14.99.
Rather than hunting up your Halloween cookie cutters and rolling out a batch of cookie dough, this year you can bake Halloween cookies in Wilton's new Halloween cookie pan. Getting cookies shaped like ghosts, mummies, and spider webs is just a matter of rolling cookie dough into balls and placing it in each of the 12 cavities of of the cookie pan. As the cookies bake, they'll take on the shape of the Halloween designs. When you take the pan out of the oven, it's easy to remove the cookies: not only is the pan nonstick, but the designs are simple enough that cookies don't hold on to the pan. You can either serve your cookies just as they come out of the pan, or you can add frosting for decoration.
The Halloween Cookie Pan makes 12 cookies in each batch, with each cookie measuring about a quarter-inch thick. The pan works well with most cookie dough recipes, whether you make your dough from scratch or pick up a package from the store. For most recipes, you can use the baking time and temperature listed in the recipe with minimal alterations. The pan is priced at $11.99.
Whether you're headed to a potluck with enough cupcakes for a crowd or you're bringing deviled eggs for a big party, transportation can be a problem. No matter how carefully you wrap such dishes in plastic wrap, you'll wind up with frosting or deviled egg everywhere. The Deluxe Bakers Sto 'N Go offers a less messy alternative: the carrier has trays that keep whatever food you're transporting steady, leaving sticky decorations intact. You can even carry combinations of food, depending on just how much you need to carry: you can slide in a tray of deviled eggs right above a tray of brownies.
The Deluxe Bakers Sto 'N Go comes with six adjustable trays that you can swap in and out. Four of the trays are standard, while two are specially designed for deviled eggs. You can even carry taller baked goods, like cupcakes with extra frosting, by removing a tray. Just find the combination that works for whatever you need to carry. The trays can double as serving platters. The carrier is safe to use in both the microwave and dishwashers. It measures 10.5 inches by 9.5 inches by 4 5/8 inches. The Deluxe Bakers Sto 'N Go is $24.95.
(Credit:
MoMA Store)
As rewarding as it is to make a pie crust from scratch, it's not an easy task. The first challenge is achieving the flaky texture pie crust is best known for, and in shooting for this flaky goal, many cooks sacrifice uniformity in thickness. Sure, the texture will end up nice, but having the texture in addition to a nice even thickness adds both to the visual presentation of the pie and the consistency in the texture across every piece.
If you haven't mastered this art freehand, don't fret: this Adjustable Rolling Pin available at the MoMA store makes easy work of rolling an even disc with a perfectly round diameter. It comes with a set of removable ends that are sized to control the thickness of your cookie dough or crust to 1/16 inch, 1/4 inch, 3/8 inch, or 1/8 inch, and printed on the barrel are both metric and standard measurements for width.
The Adjustable Rolling Pin was designed by Damian Evans this year out of beechwood and polypropylene. It's available on the MoMA Store Web site for $20.
Pizzelles are one of my favorite cookies: they're wafer-thin and have wafflelike patterns baked into them. The patterns can get quite elaborate, with particularly fancy patterns used for cookies meant for entertaining. But pizzelles are nearly impossible to make without a maker like the VillaWare Prego Pizzelle Baker. The cookies are so thin that the only way to get the crisp texture and delicate patterns is to drop dough straight onto the baker's hot surfaces and lock the top and bottom plates together. As little as 30 seconds later, you'll have a hot pizzelle. The baker makes preparing pizzelles so easy that you can take advantage of one of pizzelles' features: when they're fresh off the griddle, they're still pliable, which allows you to roll or fold them. They can make great cannoli shells or be filled with other treats.
The VillaWare Prego Pizzelle Baker offers nonstick surfaces that make baking even easier and minimizes cleanup. The surfaces are imprinted with traditional fiori patterns. With practice, you can use it to turn out two pizzelles every 30 seconds. The electric baker has an automatic thermostat that notifies you when it's ready to start baking. The pizzelle baker is approximately $50.
When I was a kid, I had a book of animals: each page was cut into thirds so that I could put an elephant's head on a tiger's body with a giraffe's feet. The same concept was used to create the Twist and Press Cookie Cutters, from Williams-Sonoma. The cookie cutters have four sides, divided into three sections that you can mix and match. Currently, the cookie cutters are available in two different versions: a fashion cookie cutter and a robot cookie cutter. The fashion cutter creates different outfits for models by allowing you to change hairstyles, shirts, and legs. The robot cutter lets you come up with different mechanically-inclined cookies by swapping out heads, torsos, and legs complete with pinchers and grabbers.
The Twist and Press Cookie Cutter does make cookies a little bigger than what you're used to--about 2 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches--but they offer great opportunities for decoration. It's necessary to roll out dough a little thicker than you might with another cookie cutter so that the details from the cookie cutter are not lost when you bake the cookies. The Twist and Press Cookie Cutters are each available for $14.99.
(Credit:
Sky Mall)
When I was a kid, I used to read volume after volume of the Guinness Book of World Records. In my later years, this quest for knowledge of the world and the people in it developed into a love of science and experimentation, Trivial Pursuit, and Ripley's Believe It or Not. If, like me, you grew up loving random bits of trivial knowledge, you'd be just the type who'd love this Equal Measure measuring cup.
Not only does the cup provide you with the measuring accuracy needed for premium baking and cooking, it teaches you a few fun facts about the world and the human body, volumetrically speaking.
OK, so the prospect of finding out how many body cells die on an average day might not be the goal you had in mind when you began to bake chocolate chips cookies. But the cup also tells you how much water is in a cloud the size of a bus, how much corn oil you can use to run a biodiesel vehicle, and how much salt is in an average human body (you can even try to bake a human body if you can find the other ingredients).
Rather than firing up the oven when you want a batch of fresh-baked cookies, the Nostalgia Bakery Express offers cookie-baking capabilities in a countertop appliance. It offers baking temperatures between 375 degrees and 400 degrees Fahrenheit--as long as your cookie recipe calls for a temperature inside that range, you can have cookies ready to eat in just minutes. You place your cookie dough on a nonstick cast aluminum tray that sits inside the Nostalgia Bakery Express. About a half dozen cookies will fit on the tray, assuming that they're 2 inches in diameter.
The Nostalgia Bakery Express comes with eight cookie molds, as well as 12 cookie cutters and a spatula to remove the cookies. It can be a little easier to manage for smaller hands than a full-sized oven, making it a good option if you want to bake cookies with the children. It also provides an easy way to bake cookies outside of the kitchen--taking some cookie dough and the Nostalgia Bakery Express into the office can make for a special treat at work. The appliance measures 13.5 inches by 10.5 inches by 4 inches and can just sit on the counter as it bakes. The Nostalgia Bakery Express is priced at $16.80.
There is an amazing variety of cake pans available these days, but who has room in their cabinets for all those different options? With the Bundt Fancy Springform Pan with Two Bottoms from Nordic Ware, that question is a little less of an issue. The pan uses a typical springform ring but allows you to easily switch between a flat bottom with a waffle pattern--ideal for cheesecakes, layer cakes, tarts and more--and a fluted tube bottom--which works well for Bundt cakes. The ring is 9 inches, and will work with any recipe that is meant for a 9-inch pan. The pan's parts are made of aluminized steel and are resistant to both rust and warping.
The Bundt Fancy Springform Pan with Two Bottoms seals tightly as you change out bottoms. Like other springform pans, you do not need to worry about the pan leaking and making a mess in your oven. Each of the three parts also has a nonstick finish so they release cakes and other treats easily. The nonstick finish also simplifies cleanup: the pan should only be washed by hand, preferably with mild detergent. The pan is $18.
