Baking 101 with Lynn

Friday, and an extensive teux-deux list to tackle. I love the sense of achievement one has in crossing the little items off one by one! Some things are mundane and take ten seconds to accomplish, but they get forgotten about if not notated. Anyway, I crossed off a whole heap of things including baking and grocery shopping and a pot of pea and ham soup. I'm trying to stockpile a bit on the baking side of things - not because I love baking but because I love stockpiling! My blog readers have often commented that I'm industrious - I'm not, really, and it's taken me a long time to get into regular biscuit making. These are things that help me:
I like to have the kitchen clean before I start, and I've limited myself to this workspace...the more space one has, the more the mess tends to spread.
My two most favourite kitchen items: electronic scale and proper beater with a good engine. The scale has been unbelievably helpful - pop a bowl on, tare it, add an ingredient, reset to zero, add another ingredient, reset to zero...makes things so easy. I've even started converting fluid amounts to grams on each recipe as I go, eg I know that half a cup of packed brown sugar = 105g. It's easier by far to spoon sticky brown sugar into a mixing bowl than it is to pack it into a cup. And butter...who can ever get the right amount of butter into a tablespoon? As for the beater - oh the bliss after having used a stick-whisk!
Recipes: This is still a work in progress, but the idea is to have all my tried-and-true recipes (comfortable recipes, like comfy old shoes) in one place for easy access. I dislike having to page through several books to try find an old favourite, or to remember which book it was in the first place! This little compilation will keep growing.
I use two mixing bowls, large and medium. The medium bowl doesn't always get used but is handy when you need to premeasure and sieve dry ingredients, or separately melt butter etc. These bowls are so convenient and take the guesswork out of 'where to begin' when you're faced with a cupboard full of clumsy tupperwares. I also have an array of measuring cups and spoons, and other than those I use a knife and a spoon.
Ingredients at the ready - I assemble everything so I know I have what I need, and so it's there when I need it. I've organized most of my dry ingredients into tupperwares like the ones on the right, and they sit neatly in my pantry. As soon as I've used something, I close it and put it back on the shelf so I minimize clutter along the way. If I'm baking a variety of biscuits in one sitting, I keep out anything I'm reusing and do a small clean-up between each batch - rinse out bowls, wipe down counters, put away anything extra.
Logs! This technique revolutionized the time it took to roll things into balls. So much easier to roll the dough into a log form (sometimes the dough is very mushy and needs to be wrapped in clingfilm before even starting to form the log), chill it and then cut slices. Looks neat too. Not all dough is suited to this technique eg things with choc-chips or oats, but even then I start with a log and slice it (no chilling) before rolling into balls, which is easier than teaspooning out individual portions for each biscuit.
Ta-da! One last thing...instead of greasing cookie sheets, I line them with baking paper or silicone mats - it's clean and healthier. Anyone for a cuppa?

PS...the boys were dressed and ready for school again today and although I didn't do a room inspection, at a glance things looked pretty good. They are definitely getting it!