New Baking Items

Yesterday I was out shopping with my mother. She wanted to go to a store we have out here called Lidl. It's a kind of half brand name Aldi type store. Every week they have a couple of days that bring in sale/ad items. Yesterday, they already had the sale stuff that was suppose to start the day after (today) already out.

I took advantage of this to get some of the baking items they had on sale. Specifically found a very nice silicon baking sheet. It's meant to be placed on top of a cookie sheet to prevent major sticking and such. Almost all of my cook wear is non-stick coated but there are still quite a number of cookie recipes and such that would/will benefit from this sheet such as my meringue cookies as well as my macaroon one which both call for me to both grease and flour even a non-stick pan. I already have plans to mess with this sheet this weekend!

Now, here is why I'm really posting though. While looking through their on sale baking stuff, I came across something I think will become my newest and most loved baking item of all. It's a 6 place mini-loaf pan... also again non-stick.

The first thing that came through my mind was a recipe (I'll be posting after this) for some wonderful apple cinnamon muffins with crumb topping that I made recently. These were wonderful but because of the small/compact space that the muffin tins have, the whole 'cake' part of the muffin was all but lost... all that really remained were all of these pieces of apple trying to fight for room with the batter. I think that this loaf pan will being a whole new meaning to it without having to make an entire cake that again needs to be cut, stored, kept fresh ect because it has been cut into.

Another thought at the top of the list was that when making gluten-free you loose a lot of that 'bounce' that the gluten gives things. Like where you only have to fill a muffin tin 1/2 to 3/4's full, when baking this style you more need to fill it 3/4 to full instead. When trying to actually make a full cake, there are so many things you have to keep in mind when doing it because 2 things can/most likely will go wrong....

1. the cake is very thin because there is no big raising like gluten style cakes
2. anything you place IN the cake in the way of chocolate chips, fruit, nuts and so forth, will stink to the bottom of the pan ending up either at the top of an upside down cake/bread (which I make the most) or the bottom of your cake all together.

So with this, I'm hoping that I will be able to make some wonderful 'little' cakes instead of always trying to make muffins so that I can counter-act the missing gluten element. Only time will tell :) I will be trying to play with this new item sometime in the coming months. Hubby is due to have LOTS of time off... in fact the rest of the year's time I think he only fully works 4 more weeks and has the rest in vacation time. This will be the prefect time to have fresh baked goods in the house!