Second try, since I couldn’t get the screenshot to appear here.
Cupcake carrier: using a sheet pan of any size, apply masking/painting tape from rim to rim, to form an elevated grid with segments the right size to hold a cupcake in its paper liner. Better than using the muffin tin itself, which means frosting on fingers as you try to grasp the liner to lift it out.
Spaetzle maker: Punch holes in one side of a thick styrofoam tray. Dump the batter over the unpunctured half and use a dough scraper or spatula to drag the batter over the holes. Rap the tray on the edge of the pot of boiling water/broth to keep the holes from clogging. Unless you make spaetzle often, you don’t need to buy the pricey unitasker.
the best use I’ve found for my “tomato knife” - i.e. serrate ~5 inch blade - is to slash bread loaves ala a lame.
like , , , gag me with a loaf , , , a slash is a slash . . . the serrations do a fine job of that…
2 Likes
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
6
I just use a sharp knife, or touch one up and then hone it if I don’t have one quite that sharp at the moment. But I usually do.
Daughter #3 has a lame here that hasn’t seen much use. I’ve tried it several times, but it’s kind of lame.
P.S. what do you use to hold the razor blade while you’re forcing it into the bamboo? Have you ever had a blade snap in half while pushing it in?
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
7
I posted this in the baking thread last year; it’s for when I have a higher hydration dough that would otherwise spread more width-wise than I want during the final rise.
I jokingly call it
Apparatus and Method for Forced Verticality of Leavened Products.
That’s the official internal project name. I plan to market it as The Rise-O-Matic™
Works okay. Basically I’m doing a DIY loafpan without the downsides of using a loaf pan.
More often I will staple together a couple of 1-inch tall stripes of aluminum foil, then staple it into an ellipse in the size I approximate that I want to have the loaf grow outward before it’s forced to rise upward only as it starts pressing against the band. Oh, and I oil the band so it comes off a bit easier. (I don’t have a pic of this).
I put 3 small vertical cuts on the foil and bend the “collars” outward a bit to make it easier to rip off after about 6 minutes of baking. Six seems to be about as low as I can go to have the loaf fully retain its shape (might be hard to tell from the 2 photos above, but using the “rise-o-matic” did permit it to start kind of oozing outward as soon as I removed it to go into the oven). A bit longer with the band is better, but you can almost always see that it had been banded due to that part of the crust being slightly less brown.
ETA - forgot my DIY magnetic knife holder. Mainly because it didn’t work very well - magnets were way too strong for this application but I never got around to buying enough more of the weaker ones (I only had a few weaker magnets on hand).
I placed the magnets on the inside and outside of the window pane in attraction opposition, then just slapped that cork-backed ruler onto the magnets. Held too well and I had to do a twisting motion to remove a knife.
That never occurred to me.