BAKING WITHOUT SCRUBBING

Baking is fun, therapeutic and very rewarding—especially when you were born with a substantial sweet tooth as I was. I bake often, in any season, any time and it’s rare I buying anything commercial in the sweets department—except occasional ice cream that I cannot make at home as well as the commercial ice cream makers.

The worst part of baking is the cleanup work, often involving heavy scrubbing using elbow grease. As an experienced, long-term baker I came to an easy solution: disposables. Not my favored answer since I am running a totally green kitchen eliminating as much from ending up in the landfill as possible.

What I do is lining the baking pan with aluminum foil, spraying with oil spray to prevent sticking and bake as usual. (This is for anything baked in a baking pan.) After cooling, I gently lift everything out of the pan by grabbing the foil and carefully turning it over onto my butcher block so now it rests upside down. The foil peels off as easily as banana peel.

Now I turn the goodies over again to right side up and if it’s fairly cool, I can easily cut it into squares, diamonds, bars with my serrated bread knife. I can even reuse my foil to cover it or freeze part of it. No scrubbing at all, the pan is clean. And very little to add to the landfill.