My favourite kitchen tools - from the obvious to the slightly unexpected and niche ...

... plus my April round-up & a recipe for Toasted Cinnamon and Brown Rice Horchata

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This week I want to share my favourite kitchen tools with you -  those tools and equipment that support all my fun baking and dessert experiments. These range from the probably seemingly obvious, like a standmixer, to the slightly unexpected or niche (hotel shower caps)! The list is by no means exhaustive but I’ll share why I consider each tool or piece of equipment essential for how I like to bake. 

In addition, below you will also find my April round-up with everything I enjoyed reading, baking, cooking and eating/drinking! And because yesterday was 5 May, aka Cinco de Mayo, I have Mexican food on my mind and warmer temperatures mean I also have iced coffee on my mind. So below you will also find my recipe for Toasted Cinnamon and Brown Rice Horchata - because I have yet to meet a tastier iced coffee than a Horchata Iced Coffee!

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My Favourite Kitchen Tools

For me to consider a tool essential it has to be something that I reach for time and time again and cannot imagine making do without. Ideally, the tool is multi-purpose or, if not, it performs the one task I need it to perform that much better than any alternatives (I am looking at you hotel shower caps!).

You obviously don’t need a lot of equipment to get started making cakes and desserts (but you do need some equipment) and the list below is necessarily subjective - it reflects how I like to bake. Depending on what you enjoy baking or making the most, you might not need all of this equipment or might feel there are important omissions. If the latter, I would love to hear what other kitchen tools or equipment you consider essential!

1. Microplane

If you don’t own a Microplane yet, buy one, especially the classic long and narrow zester. I use it most days in my cooking - it does an excellent job of grating parmesan and other hard cheese, replaces the need for a garlic press (and is superb at grating fresh ginger as well) and also means you can get rid off those tiny nutmeg graters that are impossible to use without scraping some skin off your knuckles! Beyond savoury food though, a Microplane zester has many additional uses - it makes quick work of zesting all manner of citrus fruits, has no trouble finely grating Turmeric (should you want to make some Fresh Turmeric and Lemon Curd for your next brunch!) helps finely grate Tonka Beans (delicious when roasting rhubarb!), can be used to shave down excess tart dough after pre-baking your tart crust and can also be used to finish off cakes - e.g. grating some dark chocolate to adorn a Black Forest Cake or grating some nuts to decorate things like panna cotta or custard tarts.

2. Heat-resistant Spatula

Spatulas are simple tools but so useful - from stirring things like Miso Butterscotch Sauce, to carefully folding beaten egg whites into cake batter or melted chocolate for making mousse au chocolat, to gently stirring custards to cleaning out mixing bowls (or my morning porridge saucepan). I consider them a staple tool in my kitchen and one I reach for most days. While I don’t have a preferred brand for spatulas (but do prefer buying them in professional kitchen equipment stores), after once watching one of my spatulas slowly melt into some caramel I now insist on buying heat-resistant spatulas. Also, they should be flexible and not rigid - although that is just personal preference.

3. Spice grinder 

If you are the kind of person who wants to make their own powdered Hojicha (to bake these Madeleines) or who stuffs their suitcase with handfuls of fig leaves from the fig tree in your Italian Airbnb’s garden so you can make a fig leaf and shrubby fig coffee cake (inspired by Natasha Pickowicz), then a little electric spice grinder belongs in your toolkit. Yes, a mortar and pestle can perform the same or at least a similar job but an electric spice grinder is hard to beat in terms of results, speed and elbow grease required.

I use mine frequently - for anything ranging from making my own spice mixes from whole spices, to making my own ground Hojicha powder to powdered Hibiscus to make shockingly pink glazes for example. A spice grinder can even turn granulated or caster sugar into powdered sugar in case you are out.

4. Bench scrapers 

It wasn’t until I started baking sourdough bread regularly that I understood the value of bench scrapers. Baking high hydration sourdough bread, a bench scraper becomes an extension of your hands, allowing you to swiftly manipulate a sticky mass of dough into a beautiful and taut round of dough ready for its final proof. Bench scrapers also allow you to cleanly divide dough - e.g. when baking individual brioches or things like Hot Cross Buns or cutting individual scones. There is also no need to own a pastry cutter if you have a benchscraper. 

These days I keep several bench scrapers in my kitchen drawer - a couple of flexible ones as well as a rigid metal one. The rigid metal one I mainly use to manipulate dough, divide dough or as a pastry cutter. But the flexible ones are fantastic for scraping every last bit of cake batter or cookie dough out of my mixing bowls, cleaning up my countertops and also picking up any remnants of my toddler’s dinner off the floor (you know you are parent when you have devised the perfect system to efficiently pick up cooked rice from the flour without smearing half of it into your wooden floor!). 

5. Scales with rechargeable batteries 

I have gone through more kitchen scales than any person should in a lifetime. From cheap to expensive they all eventually die on me for some reason. On top of that, since I am using kitchen scales most days of the week, both when I cook and bake, I was also buying a tonne of batteries to keep my scales going. So the best thing I can recommend other than finding a decent set of electronic kitchen scales is to invest in rechargeable batteries and always have a set readily charged. There is nothing worse than wanting to start a baking project when the shops are already closed only to realise the batteries for your kitchen scale are dead yet again and you are out of replacements!

6. Mini frying pan

When I went to Lisbon a few years ago I saw the tiniest frying pan in a local shop - the perfect size for a single fried egg. It cost me about EUR 2.50 and I thought it would be the perfect size to melt small amounts of butter or toast small amounts of spices. And I was right. Tiny as it is, it heats up fast and evenly and is the perfect size to quickly toast some breadcrumbs, nuts, seeds or spices (like for this Pistachio Dukkah!) or melt small amounts of butter (e.g. to grease a cake pan when I forgot to take the butter out of the fridge in advance). 

7. Standmixer 

I was 35 when I finally treated myself to my first standmixer - a beautiful red professional KitchenAid I bought for myself to celebrate buying my first apartment - so I baked and developed recipes for many many years without one. So no, a standmixer is technically not essential but it does make your life so much easier. And in some ways it is essential in the sense that making certain recipes without a standmixer is just asking for trouble - e.g. the long and slow mixing brioche dough requires, or making your own marshmallows which requires slowly pouring boiling hot sugar syrup into your mixing bowl while continuing to beat your egg whites. 

8. Offset spatula

Offset spatulas are inexpensive and great for many reasons. You can use them to evenly distribute cake batter inside a loaf pan or across a sheet pan (e.g. when baking Swiss Roll) or meringue (to make meringue shards for example), to evenly spread different types of filling (for cinnamon rolls), to ice and frost cakes, cupcakes etc. But they also come in handy when trying to gently loosen cake from the walls of your cake tin or creme caramel or flan before inverting them (and without scratching your tins as much as using a knife might).

9. Measuring spoons

When I started doing more and more recipe development, I invested in a set of nestling measuring spoons (admittedly it wasn’t a major investment!). Sure, a scale with the ability to weigh in grams the tiny amounts typically needed for things like baking powder, baking soda, dried active yeast or spices would be more accurate but using measuring spoons sure beats trying to eyeball 1/4 teaspoon worth of anything, especially given the different size of teaspoons, and helps ensure consistency.

10. Sheet pans, cake pans etc. 

If you are somewhat at the start of your baking journey, and before you start investing in all kinds of beautiful and intricate Bundt cake moulds and individual tart rings of different sizes, I am here to tell you that you can get a lot of baking done with a few core pieces of equipment. A decent sheet pan will come in handy not just for sheetcakes and things like Swiss Roll. No, you can even make layer cakes with just a sheet pan. I think it was Natasha Pickowicz with her More than Cake book who got us hooked on the idea that a single sheetpan worth of sponge cake can be cut and assembled into a fancy 3 layer cake (assuming you Frankenstein the middle layer somewhat).

In addition to a good sheet pan I am also a huge fan of having a straight sided loaf pan - straight sided simply because I like the right angle it produces. And of course it is useful for baking loaf cakes, brioche etc. But you can also use your loaf pan for baking smaller versions of other recipes such as brownies, cheesecake, coffee cake etc. Perfect, when you want something sweet but don’t have that many mouths to feed!

I’m also a huge fan of owning a brownie pan - i.e. a rectangular baking pan, roughly 20x30cm in size and with somewhat higher edges (but maybe not quite as high as a roasting tin). I use mine for anything from brownies and blondies, to cheesecake, quiche, foccaccia and pizza, sponge cake for small rectangular layer cakes etc.

Lastly, a muffin try - because you can use a muffin tray not just to bake muffins but also for things that come in individual servings like cinnamon rolls, pastel de nata, financiers and friands etc.

11. Hotel Shower Caps

Yes, I consider these kitchen equipment. While these are maybe not the most sustainable kitchen equipment, they are the most perfect thing to use to cover bowls of proofing dough - they are much better at staying in place than most clingfilm (which often doesn’t “cling” at all if you ask me) and are reusable many times and also do a better job at preventing the dough from drying out while it’s rising than covering your mixing bowl with a tea towel or similar. 

12. Nutmilk bag

To make nut- and seed milks, of course - including today’s Horchata (see below). But a nutmilk bag is also super useful when making labneh or straining cooked fruits like apples or quinces to make jelly or indeed to add the pips etc. of citrus fruits when boiling marmalade. In short, you can use it in a similar way to a fine mesh sieve but since it’s made from flexible material it won’t take up as much space in your kitchen drawer. Just make sure you always let it thoroughly dry before you store it away so it doesn’t become mouldy.

13. Unscented floss

Unscented dental floss has one purpose in my kitchen: cut cinnamon roll dough into neat individual rolls with perfectly intact spirals of dough and buttery filling. It works far better than any sharp knife, serrated or not. Of course, there is no need to buy floss specifically to keep in the kitchen - unless you like your floss to have a minty flavour, in which case it does make sense to keep a separate unscented one in the kitchen, especially if you bake cinnamon rolls or similar buns with a sweet or savoury filling a lot! 

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April Round-up

Reading

About a week ago my friend Kaja’s new book Cookies and Crumb arrived. Her book has been out for a while but was initially only published in Swedish. Now an English translation is finally available. And it is phenomenal. I am obviously biased because Kaja is a friend. But thanks to the Supperclub we used to host in Brussels I also know how deeply she cares about good food, made from high quality ingredients and how all the places she has called home and visited during her many many travels inspire her delicious recipes. And it shows in this book - from her recommendations on which ingredients to use, all the info on how to achieve different types of cookie textures and troubleshooting tips to the super creative cookie recipes (using the likes of Sumac, Coffee, Ras El Hanout, Licorice Powder etc. to name just a few!). 

I am currently away on a family trip in Romania and while having a toddler leaves little time for reading, I have started turning the pages of Kate Lebo’s The Book of Difficult Fruit. A book I picked up somewhat randomly on our last trip to Waterstones when trying to use up some loyalty points but I’m glad I did. It’s basically an essay collection on different difficult fruits (one for each letter of the alphabet) with a mix of recipes thrown in. It’s a little random, highly subjective but full of beautiful prose and some interesting factoids. In short, my favourite kind of food writing.  

I also know that Nicola Lamb’s new Baking Bible SIFT will be waiting for me when I come home and I cannot wait to dive into all those infographics and delicious recipes (did you hear about the Burnt White Chocolate Pannacotta with Soy Sauce?! Incredible!). 

Baking

Despite April being one of the busiest months at work I have had in a while I did manage to do quite some baking. Mainly some more recipe testing for a Tahini Brioche recipe I am working on but which isn’t quite ready for sharing yet (but I am hopeful I am getting close!), these Chamomile Financiers that I shared a few weeks ago, and I also started to bake my way through Kaja’s book, starting with the outrageously delicious (and toddler approved!) Oat Cookies with Apricot & and Pistachio Dukkah. 

Cooking / Eating

This past month the weather has done exactly what you expect it to do in April - after some very warm and sunny days, temperatures suddenly dropped down to what I like to call “soup weather”. So I turned to my trusty Turkish lentil soup (based on the recipe from Istanbul and Beyond). Recently, however, I have started to skip the pureeing and keep the soup chunky and give it a Shakshuka-ish / Çilbir-ish treatment - with poached eggs, thick yoghurt (garlic yoghurt if I feel fancy) and aleppo chilli flakes and nigella seeds in foamy butter plus a squeeze of lemon juice to finish it. Not authentic but a delicious twist on an already delicious soup!

For some reason I have also had Shawarma on my mind a lot and made both the Chicken Shawarma from Soframiz a couple of times as well as the Cauliflower Shawarma from Extra Good Things. And for one of our Shawarma dinners I also made a delicious black garlic toum - a first test for a new recipe I’m working on.

Researching for my Ingredient Spotlight on Sumac I also randomly stumbled upon a recipe for Philipino Adobo so we had that for dinner one night, which even the toddler wolfed down.

And while I was cutting it a bit fine, I just about managed to squeeze in this year’s first Tepache. If you are not familiar with it is a fermented pineapple drink made with spices like cloves and cinnamon and that is quite common in Mexico. It is super easy to make and is a really fun (and delicious!) way to use pineapple peels instead of just throwing them in the bin right away. The key is to have a nicely ripe pineapple – this will infinitely improve the flavour of your Tepache. See here for a recipe.

What have you been reading / cooking / baking drinking lately that you enjoyed?

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Toasted Cinnamon Brown Rice Horchata

Inspired by Jessica Koslow’s All I Want To Eat

Notes: This makes approx. 1 liter that will keep for about 4-5 days if stored in the fridge. The horchata will likely separate once set aside but you can remix it by shaking the bottle a few times. You can make this as sweet as you want - Jessica Koslow uses 6 dates for a similar quantity of horchata. To me that is as tooth-achingly sweet as Moroccan mint tea so I just use 2 dates. But if you like things very sweet, simply use more dates.

Makes 1 liter

Ingredients

1 cinnamon stick
2 dates, pitted
125g almonds
125g brown rice
Pinch of salt
1L water

Directions

In a dry pan toast the cinnamon stick over medium heat until fragrant, making sure to turn it frequently so it does not burn.

Add the cinnamon stick to a large bowl together with the pitted dates, almonds, rice and salt. Pour over the water and leave to soak overnight. In the morning, add everything to the bowl of a food processor or pitcher of a blender and process until all the solids are finely ground (you are looking for a sandy consistency). Strain using a nutmilk bag and make sure you really wring out the nutmilk bag to get every single drop of horchata. Store in the fridge.

And for the most delicious iced coffee, simply add a handful of ice cubes to a jar, pour a shot of espresso over the ice cubes and fill the glass up with horchata.