Mad Bakeware: Fat Daddio's Mad Dadder Cake Pans

Image from Colette's Cakes

What!? That cake looks crazy! It’s so tilted and delicious looking that I’m getting dizzy! 

It’s called a Mad Hatter cake, a style popularized by baker Colette Peters of Colette’s Cakes. It totally broke the cake mold (pun!) and I don’t see how anyone could go back to baking regularly-shaped cakes after seeing this. 

And now, thanks to Fat Daddio’s Bakeware, you can make a Mad Hatter cake at home. Fat Daddio’s has constructed a pan that bakes tilted cakes that can be stacked to create the Mad Hatter cake effect. The closest object I can compare it to - and this is not meant to be appetizing – is a pool: one end is shallow, one end is deep, which creates a kind of right triangle with its top cut off.

The innovation with Fat Daddio’s Mad Dadder pans is that it comes with a stand to hold up the shallow end so that cakes bake up level. These pans come in square and round shapes and in 4 different sizes (6, 8, 10 and 12 inches). 

The Mad Dadder. Notice the stand on the left that keeps the pan level.

Buy one pan and you can use frosting to illustrate different tilted layers (good for creating a Cat In The Hat hat cake). But even better, buy several different sizes and you can stack the cakes up like a pyramid, creating that wonderful whirling effect. 

Square, round and rectangle cakes have had their day. They are bland (not in taste, just the way they look), staid, old news.  Buy a Mad Dadder pan (or pans) and start having fun with your cake and eat it, too.

Hot Chocolate With Whipped Cream

iSi 1 pint

I was half watching the evening news on Monday when I witnessed the weatherman make a grim prediction: “lows in the mid-30s.” He was talking about a town tens of miles from where I live, but it’s inevitable that chilly temperatures are coming. (And will stick around for, oh, I don’t know, 5 months?)

The best defense? Hot chocolate with whipped cream. 

Maybe apple cider with whipped cream is appropriate right now or at least until Nov. 1. Then it’s time for hot chocolate with whipped cream. Deeper into winter I’ll go for an Irish coffee with whipped cream.  The point is: whipped cream can get you through most grim situations. 

iSi 1/2 pint

Those fluffy, sweet clouds of aerated heavy cream complement almost anything (toast, strawberries, and even hot dogs). So would it not be prudent to have a device handy that can produce whipped cream in seconds?

Chef Tools recently added several fine whippers by iSi. These attractive, durable little stainless steel devices (“little” is an understatement, they have up to a 1 pint capacity) use nitrous oxide to produce whipped cream. You can also store your cream inside them in the refrigerator.

More, they can whip almost any liquid in a frothy cream. Turn butternut squash soup into delicious topping for vegetables (or butternut squash soup!). Cut down on calories and whip soy or coconut milk for a delicious non-dairy topping. You could even whip hot chocolate and use it as a topping for hot chocolate. These are just examples. Prepare for winter the right way and get an iSi whipper to keep your mind, body and soul from freezing in snowstorms and frigid temperatures.

Beware! The Chef Tools Halloween Department!

Lucks Dec Ons cake decorations

Forget vampires, zombies, ghouls, haunted houses and tiny, tiny candy bars – Halloween is all about the pumpkin. The gourd’s wonderful orange hue adorns everything from aprons to cast iron baking dishes (and a lot of other stuff). Even better, that sweet/savory pumpkin flavor works its way into everything from muffins to coffee to donuts to beer. Even oven-roasted pumpkin is a treat on a cool, rainy fall evening.

Thus, Halloween – and the weeks before - is still sweet for folks who are a little too old to dress up like Shrek and collect pounds of candy from the neighbors.  

Here at Chef Tools, we're well aware of the wonderfulness of Halloween, pumpkins, the color orange and caramel apples – so we’ve created an entirely new Halloween-themed department for all your Oct. 31 needs. And, we’ve reduced prices on many key items - you'll 15% off all items. 

Start with this LamsonSharp carving knife (made in the USA) and slice a scary grin into an orange gourd, or use it to turn that tasty pumpkin meat into a pie. Or flavoring for cupcake …

We have a great selection of Paper Bakeware Halloween-themed baking cups. Just fill the wrappers with batter and place in the oven. The paper is oven safe, so there’s no need to dirty a pan and the cupcakes (or cake) come out in a lovely wrapper. 

Serve the cupcakes at your Halloween party with decorations by Meri Meri. Get intricate cupcake holders, like that giant spider below; plus, we have plenty of plates, napkins and cups for all your guests. My favorite, the haunted house table centerpiece complete with ghosts, witches and craggy trees.

Meri Meri Spider Cupcake Holder Set

Check out our Halloween department. There are over 75 items, from cake molds to serving trays to food coloring. Everything you need to enjoy (a pumpkin-flavored) Halloween. Order today and get your items weeks ahead of Halloween!

Hey bakers and cake decorators, stop squandering pastry bags!

The Bag Adapter Kit

The Bag Adapter Kit is one of those ingenious products that could only come from the mind of someone who’s intimate with a particular trade. This trade happens to be cake decorating and the inventor is Michelle Hageman.

A baker/decorator for 30 years in the San Diego area, Hageman got tired of having pastry bags that could only accommodate one size coupler. To wit:

“At the end of the week, when you work in a bakery, you’re down to bags that will only get used if you’re putting icing on a cake or cupcake,” she told a the host of a morning TV news program. “When you go to get a coupler to put through the bag itself, you’ll find you have a bag you can’t use.”

“I got tired of that. Who wants to stop what they’re doing and go buy more bags?”

So, Hageman invented the Bag Adapter Kit (“we’ve got your BAK” seems to be company’s motto). It’s a simple, inexpensive device: a conical plastic piece that slides inside any pastry bag allowing you to use any size coupler (and thus decorating tip) with the bag – no matter how big the hole you cut. The BAK essentially returns the pastry bag to its original, uncut form. Here’s a video with Hageman demonstrating the BAK:

You can get a BAK at Chef Tools right now. We’re very excited about it. A long season of holiday baking kicked off last week with Rosh Hashanah, so what better time to try the BAK? Save time, save money, save pastry bags, save a trip to the store. Above all, create awesome baked confections. If you decorate cakes, cupcakes or anything else – whether as your job, hobby or for your grateful family – the BAK was made for you.

(And trying BAK benefits a good cause: Hageman donates 2 percent of all proceeds to the charity, Autism Speaks.)

Architec: stylish and durable, a plastic alternative

Architec Purelast mixing bowl set (cool)

You’ll see these bowls by Architec start to pop up everywhere, including Chef Tools (available 9/30). At least, I hope you'll start seeing them more (especially in your kitchen), anyway. 

That’s because these bowls are special. They look like plastic, feel like plastic and are as easy to clean as plastic. But, you can’t call them plastic. These bowls are made of 98 percent natural materials. The exact recipe is secret (and it’s probably too complicated for a non-chemist brain to understand), but they’re kind of like those Sun Chips bags made of corn … without all the noise. 

Man has created many plastic things. Look around you and you’ll see that almost everything close to you is made of plastic. There’s probably a lot of plastic in your kitchen, too. It’s almost freeing to find a product that’s not made of plastic. These bowls mean less pollution and less waste. Let's hear it for innovation!

Not to mention, these bowls are really stylish. The colors are cool, the curves are cool, the manufacturing process is cool (made in the USA). 

Head to Chef Tools this weekend and pick up some durable, non-plastic essentials. We have added:

• 3 mixing bowl sets

• 3 sets of prep cups

• 3 sets of condiment cups

We’ve also added some other fine Architec products; made of plastic, but still incredibly useful, durable and stylish. These cutting boards won’t dull knives – and the kicker (pun intended) – have hundreds of tiny feet on the bottom so the board won’t slip. 

Architec Gripper Cutting Board

Check out our “What’s New” page to find out about all the great stuff we’ve added in recent weeks (just go to our homepage, scroll down and click the “What’s New” box):

• All new OXO Good Grips gadgets, mixing bowls and small appliances (coming 9/30)

• Emerilware Pie and Cake Maker

• WMF Profi Ball Whisks

• Shun cutlery