Make your kitchen work smoothly

Anyone who is into cooking will have gradually made a list of dos and don'ts in the kitchen. We who cook swap stories about mistakes made and rectified, which is useful knowledge.

However, most of us seldom get around to listing them. We keep pages torn from magazines and newspapers — with all the intentions of putting them in order some day.

But when you can spare the time, just grit your teeth and get down to cataloguing them. Put each under the correct category and it will make life much easier.

Today, we are going to take a break from recipes and dwell on handy tips for smooth kitchen work.

You may be familiar with some of them; the others you can make files of or keep in a mess, as I do.

• When creaming butter and sugar, make sure you are using fine sugar. If it isn't fine sugar, put the sugar in a blender for a quick whiz — the cake will come out much lighter.
  
• While creaming batter, add a spoonful of milk to improve the texture of the cake.
  
• Place a marshmallow on a cupcake just as you remove it from the oven. It will give the cupcake a nice frosting.
  
• To keep boiled syrup from crystallising, add a pinch of soda to it.
  
• Brush the top of a two-crust pie with cream and then sprinkle sugar. It will bake to golden goodness. You can also use egg white instead of cream, if you like.
  
• Brush the inside of the bottom crust of a pie with egg white when making fruit pies. This prevents the fruit juice from seeping and making it soggy.
  
• To cut a fresh cake, use a thin, sharp knife previously dipped in water.
  
• When baking cookies, save the crumbs you scrape from the cookie sheet and add to your graham-cracker crumbs. Or, you can feed them to the birds in your garden.
  
• To soften brown-sugar lumps, put them in a jar, with a moist paper towel under the lid. Or heat in the oven for a few minutes.
  
• Dip a tomato in boiling water for 30 seconds and then dip it in cold water. The skin will peel off easily.
  
• Add a pinch of salt to jelly to improve the flavour.
  
• To check if a packet of yeast is still good, put a teaspoon of it in a cup of warm water and wait for it to froth.
  
  Wait for 10 minutes — if it foams, it is still good. This saves you from wasting a whole lot of butter, flour, eggs and energy, as I once did.
  
• When baking a pumpkin or a squash whole in the oven, always cut a small piece (like a window) into it to let steam escape and prevent the vegetable from bursting.
  
• Potatoes should be pricked with a fork before baking.
  
• Add a pinch of salt to apple sauce to enhance the flavour.
  
• A teaspoon of vinegar added to homemade syrup will keep it from candying after it stands.
  
• When cooking dried beans, add a little nutmeg to give it a different flavour. You can also try 1/2 teaspoon sugar.
  
• Have you tried sprinkling a little salt on a banana? It enhances the flavour.
  
• Leftover short-crust pastry need not be wasted. Mix a few drops of vanilla essence and a little sugar to it, roll out again, cut into shapes, brush with egg white, sprinkle more sugar and bake as cookies. You can also try sprinkling cinnamon sugar for a change of flavour.
  
• If you find your cake pan too small for the cake batter, line a few muffin tins with cupcake papers and spoon in the batter. Bake cupcakes for 20 minutes.
  
• When making chocolate cake, instead of dusting the greased pan with flour, try cocoa — you will not have a white ring at the base and the flavour will be much better.
  
• If it is required to line the pan you're baking a cake in with waxed paper, grease and flour the pan only on
  the sides.
  
  Trace the outline of the bottom of the baking tin on the paper and cut it out. It will be a perfect fit.
  
  Once the cake is baked, peeling off the paper is easy but do it while the cake is still warm.
  
• Take the cake out of the oven and set it briefly on a piece of damp cloth so the cake comes loose from the pan.
  
• Don't use fresh pineapple in gelatin desserts. It contains an enzyme that prevents the gelatin from setting. Always use canned or fresh pineapple which has been lightly cooked.
  
• Submerge lemons for 10 minutes in warm water before squeezing to extract the juice — it will yield much more juice.

Nirmal Khanna is a UAE-based freelance writer who has family, friends and guests eating out of her hands