The $1 (Or Less) Baking Tool Christina Tosi Always Keeps on Hand

If you’re new to baking, the whole process can feel a bit intimidating. There’s flour and sugar flying everywhere and tiny cups scattered across the kitchen counter. Different recipes will call for different pans and there’s a host of specialty tools that you’re still figuring out how to use. One such tool is the offset spatula, an angled utensil that pastry chefs reach for to help with everything from spreading batter to frosting cakes. But what to do if you don’t have one on hand?

If you’re Christina Tosi, you get creative. The Milk Bar founder has lots of equipment to choose from, but there’s one product that she and her team reach for again and again: a bent spoon. This ingenious trick came to Tosi as she was looking for the perfect tool to decorate Milk Bar’s signature layer cakes.

“I started using bent spoons because I was looking for a tool to spread frosting and fillings in my layer cakes, which we layer up at Milk Bar in a six-inch cake ring for perfectly unfrosted sides,” Tosi recalls. “Our frosting and filling layers are spread over crumbs and other textural elements and you need the right tool to spread evenly and without picking up too much of what’s underneath it — and that can be hard to do with an offset spatula with limited space.”

Enter: a stainless steel spoon bent at a 90-degree angle. She dips them into the flavored soaks that Milk Bar uses to keep their cakes tender and does a self-described “Jackson Pollack-style splatter” over each layer. They help spread fillings and frostings and, for those who prefer a frosted look, can be used to create swoops and swirls across the top and sides.

Bent spoons aren’t just handy for layered cakes. They also play an important role in making Cereal Milk — it can serve as a makeshift masher that helps extract any remaining flavor from the soaked cereal as it strains.

Before you reach into your kitchen drawer and start manipulating your existing dinnerware, Tosi notes that this technique actually works better with cheaper spoons and recommends this inexpensive set from Winco. At less than a dollar each, they’re perfect for bending without worry.

“There’s no need to bend the nice stuff you've got in your silverware drawer: the cheaper the spoon, the easier to bend!”

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