If you’re looking for kitchen shortcuts, you’re probably looking for ways to get dinner on the table more quickly—or at least more efficiently. You may not be looking for a quick dessert. Is there even such a thing as a decent 5-minute treat?
Indeed, yes. You haven’t yet tried the most decadent chocolate pudding imaginable. (It’s made—spoiler alert!—with tofu.) Or crisp little ginger cookies that don’t require a rolling pin. (Just a package of wonton wrappers.) Or an orange sheet cake that never dirties a bowl or a whisk. (It’s made in a food processor, right down to grinding the orange into the batter.)
Cooking is physics, all heat and sizzle. But baking is chemistry, a complex set of ratios. In these recipes, pay close attention to the ingredient amounts. Don’t go varying them (or the ingredients themselves) unless you know what you’re doing. There is no shortcut out of a bad cake.
Some of these recipes call for baking spray, not nonstick spray. Baking spray is a combination of flour and oil. Naturally, it’s a great time-saver for a busy cook. But note that there’s no need to spray a pan so that it’s thickly coated in white foam. Instead, give it a light but thorough coating, with no holes or gaps visible, paying careful attention to the crevices where the sides of the pan meet its bottom.
If you want to skip the canned spray and go old-school, use softened butter and all-purpose flour. (Or canola oil on a paper towel, if there’s no butter in the recipe.) The easiest way to butter a pan is to let the required butter soften to room temperature in its wrapper. When you unwrap it, some butter will inevitably stick to the wrapper. Run the buttered side of this wrapper all over the inside of the pan. Dust the pan with flour by adding only a tablespoon or two, then shifting the pan this way and that, tipping it on its sides, all to move the flour around to all the available interior surface. You’ll also be able to spot any sections you missed with the butter or oil. Fix these before going on. And tap out any excess flour into the garbage can.
Finally, just before dessert, one more piece of advice, maybe not strictly culinary, just run-of-the-mill friendly: Use your time wisely. Not your time in the kitchen. Well, yes, that, as this book illustrates again and again—but mostly your time elsewhere. If you’re saving it, you’re doing so for a reason, right? To have more of it? Then take the pleasure of it. Don’t feel you must be productive every found second. Instead, treat that extra time as a gift. In the same way that it’s (rarely) fun to get a rake or a feather duster for your birthday, consider the gift of extra time to be a modern luxury, not a hard-fought necessity. If the point of saving time is to have it, then the point of having it should be to enjoy it.