Baking for Beginners: Some Essential Baking Tools

When you decide to bake for the first time, the baking aisle can be quite daunting. There are so many baking tools and equipment to choose from – not everything will be necessary. Let’s not mention the fact that baking tools and equipment can be quite expensive. There are a few essential baking tools that any amateur or even professional baker requires. Here are a few tools that I think are essential and which I certainly cannot bake without.

Measuring spoons

These spoons usually include 1 tablespoon, 1 teaspoon, ½ teaspoon, ¼ teaspoon and 1/8 teaspoons. Often recipes will call for 1 teaspoon of essence or 2ml salt and measuring spoons are great for measuring small quantities of dry and wet ingredients.

measuring spoons

Measuring cups and jugs

These are used in recipes that require a larger quantity of dry or wet ingredients. Measuring cups come in sizes of ¼, ½, ¾ and 1 cup. Measuring jugs are mainly used for measuring wet (or your liquid ingredients such as milk, water, oil). The measurements usually appear down the side of the jug.

measuring cups

 

measuring jug

Wooden spoon and spatula

These are perfect for mixing the various ingredients together. Spatulas are used for recipes that require folding to incorporate air into the mixture. Spatulas are also used to scrape out the bowl to ensure that little to no mixture remains in the bowl.

wooden spoon

 

spatulas

Whisk and egg beater

Most recipes call for eggs to be beaten – whisk and egg beaters are great for this. It can be used for whipping, creaming and mixing eggs, cream and other ingredients. Unless you intend to do a lot of baking, it is not necessary to buy an electric mixer, with all of its gadgets.

whisk

 

egg beater

Mixing Bowl

This speaks for itself. Every baker should have at least one mixing bowl to mix all the ingredients and to make the cake batter.

mixing bowls

Cake pan/baking sheet

Cake pans are used to bake your cake in and baking sheets are usually used for biscuits and meringues and the like. Even though most pans and baking sheets that you purchase are non-stick, I still prefer to grease my pans and line the baking sheets.

various typs of cake pans and baking sheets

Conversion tables

Depending on where you live in the world, some recipes are in grams, kilograms and litres, whilst other recipes are in ounces and pounds. You can now download an easy conversion table that allows you to convert any recipe to the measurement system that you are using in your part of the world.

Download Easy Conversion Tables here.