So this year, I'll just share a few general "baking life hacks" that you will hopefully find useful!
- Silicon baking sheets. I have four of these, and using them has brought down cookie breakage from significant to about zero for me. Even now that I have newer non-stick baking sheets, I still use them. Additional benefit: The silicone sheet can be placed on the counter and filled with cookies, then you carefully pull the sheet onto the baking sheet or the grid.
I also use the sheets if a recipe tells me to roll dough out between layers of clingfilm, or other single-use plastic sheets, as I refuse to use single-use plastics for that (and have done so for years, even before the most recent quest to ban more plastics from our life). If you do that, and it gets harder to roll it out, it helps to remove the sheet from time to time, so the dough can spread again. - Peeling almonds. Some of my recipes call for peeled/blanched almonds. I've always bought the whole things and done any grinding myself, and that means peeling also has to be done. Usually, instructions tell you to pour boiling water over the almonds, wait a bit and then pull off the skins. I've often struggled with that... until one day, I forgot to peel them right away and the water had gone too cool. So I poured off the cold water then poured fresh boiling water over them again. They were amazingly easy to peel afterwards! I've done it similarly ever since: Steep in boiling water for a few minutes, pour off the water, add fresh boiling water, wait a little, then peel while still hot.
- Grinding nuts - I've always used an old-fashioned grinding thingie, which would yield medium-sized to rather coarse bits. I've recently discovered the trick to get the finely ground nuts or almonds, like those you can buy ready-made: Use a meat grinder with a fine disc.
- While we're talking of chopping up things, another new discovery for me: A food processor can be used to help prepare cookie dough. I've found out about that trick on American recipe sites. Fill flour, cold butter cut into thin slices, and possibly some or all of the sugar into the food processor and blitz until the butter has been transformed into small bits, covered by the flour. Then tip onto the table, add eggs and other ingredients as called for by your recipe, and knead together. This saves the cutting and crumbling up stage to mix the butter and the flour together.
- Choose cookie cutters wisely. For years, we bought a new cutter every advent, because... well, no real reason needed, right? (Actually, it was just a nice little thing to buy at a Christmas market.) However, the cutters had to pass the test - in the shop or at the market stall, we'd take several of the same cutter and try to stack them together as closely as possible. If their forms meant large spaces between the individual cutters, they'd stay right where they were. Cookie cutters with a form that will fit itself well means little space between cookies, and thus little leftover dough after each run, and thus better dough quality until the end (because you don't have to roll it out again so often, and that means less flour uptake).
- Speaking of rolling out and flour uptake: I roll my dough out on a clean cotton tea towel that gets lightly sprinkled with flour. Due to some reason, that constellation means less flour is needed. For the basic cookies that I make and that get rolled out thinly, there's the additional thickness control built in: They are thin enough when the checkered-pattern stripes of the towel start to be visible through the sheet of dough.
- Four times is about the limit of how often I roll out pastry dough. Initially, I divide the dough into pieces of suitable size for rolling out. Leftovers from the first goes are collected, all kneaded together and rolled out again. After that, depending on how much dough is left, it gets rolled out either once or twice more. At the stage where there is only a small circle of dough after rolling out, a few cookies are cut from the sheet with plenty of space inbetween, and the rest baked as it is (or maybe cut with a knife into handle-able parts). That will get you an ugly cookie or more, which are just as tasty as the nicely-shaped ones, and include the perfect excuse to eat them whenever you wish. Because obviously, ugly cookies cannot be served to others, right?
- I use the butter wrapping papers to grease sheets and forms. Once the butter has been unpacked, I fold them once or twice and stick them into the freezer compartment of our fridge. When something needs to be greased, I take one out, let it thaw for a few seconds, unfold it and rub the something with the buttery side. No greasy fingers, quick, easy, and no waste of the butter film always clinging to the wrapper no matter what.
- Leftovers after decorating? For my reindeer cookies, I make a glaze from orange juice and confectioner's sugar, plus very finely ground off orange peel. The latter is the secret to having a proper, strong enough orange taste to the glaze. Anything left of that after glazing the proper cookies goes onto the ugly cookies, making them even tastier.
Leftover chocolate from covering cookies, or other things? This can be mixed up with cornflakes to make choco crossies, chopped nuts to make nut clusters, or crumbled up cookies can be mixed in. Be creative. Bonus: The outcome can probably be classified as "ugly". - For quite liquid glazes like the orange sugar glaze, I use a brush. For everything else that needs to be applied to a surface, such as jam or molten chocolate, I use a pastry fork - for me, that works much better and is less messy than a brush. The fork is also very convenient to stirring up the jam to make it smooth enough for application. I've tried heating it up once, but that seemed to make only a very small difference, if one at all, in the end product, so I've gone back to using the cold jam, stirring it up and applying it.
If you're looking for proper recipes for baking, the seasonal recipes that I blogged in the past are:
- Linzer Plätzchen
- Lemon Lozenges
- Chocolate-Coffee-Nut Spheroids
- Schokogongs (Chocolate THINGS) and how to make the praliné for filling them
- Marzipan-stuffed dates
- Gingerbread, without flour (Nuremberg type)
- Basic cookie dough (or five types of cookies from one batch of dough)
- Vanillekipferl (vanilla crescents)
- Spitzbuben (jam-filled cookies)
- Nougatmützchen (cookies with a praline-crisp topping)