Piping nozzles, bundt tins, flour, sugar paste… being a baker means having all the equipment and ingredients to hand to whip up a tasty treat, but how do you store your baking supplies?

Storing Consumables

Keeping your baking ingredients fresh is one of the best ways to ensure you get a perfect bake every time. If you’re unsure of how to store your ingredients, here’s a helpful guide:

 

• Flour

 

Have you ever noticed little black dots in your flour? These are psocids – harmless insects that love humid kitchens and feast on dry, powdery foods. To prevent psocids, keep your flour in a sealed container in a cupboard, rather than in the fridge where moisture could cause clumping. Make sure you label your flour container, too – those American-style pancakes won’t look so fluffy when you’ve used plain flour instead of self-raising!

 

• Sugar

 

Once exposed to the air, sugar will absorb moisture and become hard and clumpy, so it’s important to transfer the sugar from the bag to a sealed container and keep on a shelf or in a cupboard out of direct sunlight. Fortunately, it’s often quite easy to tell one type of sugar from another – even white sugars like granulated and caster can be told apart by the size of the granules – but it’s always worth labelling your containers for ease.

 

• Edible Decorations

 

Storing edible decorations can seem confusing – you want your sugar paste to remain soft and pliable, but you want your icing flowers to stay rigid and hard! For sugar paste, place into a zip-lock sandwich bag, and then into an airtight container. Never wrap fondant icing in clingfilm – it will ‘sweat’. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, fondant icing can start to harden in storage, but it can be softened up with a little baking fat. As for your icing flowers, they’ll be fine as long as they’re kept away from moisture, so seal them in a container.

Storing Baking & Decorating Equipment

Keeping a tidy drawer for specialist equipment is not only an excellent way to simplify the baking process, but it also helps you to keep your bakeware in optimal condition for longer. When it comes to bakeware storage, shelves are your friend. Storing on shelves reduces the need to pile pans on top of each other – not only an accident waiting to happen, but this type of balancing act can also put your non-stick coatings at risk of being scraped off.

Handy Hints

To get more from your kitchen space, here are some clever storage solutions to try out:

 

• Magnetic Spice Racks

 

Attach them to the fridge, a magnetic strip, or even magnetic wall paint – anything to keep those pesky jars from taking up room on the work surface is a bonus!

 

• Small See-Through Drawers

 

If you have a lot of small, fiddly cake decorating equipment like piping nozzles and sugar paste moulds, you’ll know how easy it is to lose them! Store them in little see-through drawers for ease.