Kitchen Hacks for Perfect Cakes and Cookies

When frosting a cake, the act of spreading can dislodge some of the crumbs, which then get incorporated into the frosting, muddying its smoothness. Here’s how to minimize the problem.
Place large, evenly spaced dollops of frosting over the top of the cake.
Using an offset spatula, spread one dollop to another until the frosting is smooth and equally distributed.

When a cake filling differs in color from the outer frosting, it often seeps through the frosting and mars the appearance of the cake. To prevent this from happening, follow this tip.
1. Fit a pastry bag with a plain round tip and fill it with the outer frosting. Pipe a circle of the frosting around the top edge of all the layers except the one that will form the top of the cake.
2. Spread the filling inside this frosting ring. The frosting ring will seal the layers of the cake together and prevent the filling from seeping out.

Most cheesecake recipes call for wrapping a springform pan with aluminum foil before placing the cake in a water bath. The foil is meant to keep the water out, but sometimes water leaks in anyway and you wind up with an unappetizing, soggy crust. For a simple solution, place the filled springform pan in a large oven bag (the kind used for baking ham) and pull the bag up the sides of the pan, leaving the top surface of the cake exposed. When the wrapped pan is placed in a water bath, it’s sure to stay dry.

After refrigerating a baked and cooled cheesecake, you may find that unwanted moisture collects on the top of the cake, ruining your creation. Fix this problem by arranging a layer of paper towels over the cheesecake before covering it with plastic wrap and refrigerating.

Recipes for creme brulee, cheesecake, and soufflé often call for a water bath, a technique where the ramekins or baking dish is placed in a large, shallow pan of warm water to ensure gentle, even baking. If you find that you’ve overfilled the pan with water, try this simple, splash-free remedy: Use a turkey baster to siphon off the excess.

Often when you have two sheets of cookies in the oven at once, the recipe will direct you to reverse them from front to back and top to bottom. But it can be a challenge to keep track of the required movements. Simplify things by lining your baking sheets with parchment paper and marking the front edge of the paper, even indicating which pan starts on top and which on the bottom. The notation will help you keep track of which edge goes where when you reverse the pans’ positions.

Many types of cookies, including sugar cookies, spread on the baking sheet as they bake. If the balls of dough are placed too closely together on the sheet, they’ll run into each other and fuse when they spread in the oven, resulting in cookies with odd shapes and soft edges. To give each cookie a little extra space without severely limiting the number of cookies baked in a batch, arrange them as follows: Instead of placing the dough balls in neat rows of three or four so that all the cookies line up, alternate the rows. For example, three cookies in the first row, two in the second, three in the third, two in the fourth, and so on.

Using a fork to make a crosshatch pattern on the tops of peanut butter cookies is a two-step process. Here’s a way to cut the work in half: Mark the cookies in one swipe with a perforated potato masher.