Kitchen Needs

Halloween is a good five weeks off, which in a small kitchen is roughly four and a half weeks longer than you need to think about it. But if you fancy a bit of baking with the kids, or just a tray of something orange and daft for the doorstep, that doesn’t have to mean buying kit that lives in a drawer doing nothing for the other 360 days of the year.

The trick in a tight kitchen is picking things that either fold away to nothing, or do a job during the rest of the year. Here are three bits that do one or both.

A pumpkin mould that packs away like a tea towel

Silicone bends, and that’s the whole point of it here. This Halloween Silicone Mould comes as a pack of two, each with a handful of small pumpkin shaped cavities, and the listing describes it working for cake, chocolate and muffins rather than one single bake. Because it’s silicone instead of a rigid tin, it rolls or folds down small for storage, instead of taking up a shelf shaped exactly like a pumpkin for the rest of the year.

Good to know: soft silicone moulds wobble when they’re full, so it’s worth sitting this one on a solid baking tray before it goes in the oven rather than trying to carry it on its own. We haven’t tested this one ourselves, so it’s worth a read of the current listing before you buy.

A cooling rack that folds flat when the baking’s done

A cooling rack tends to claim a permanent shelf even though it only does its job for twenty minutes at a time. This one gets round that by folding flat. It’s a stainless steel, three tier rack with a non-stick coating, and the listing describes a stackable, foldable design, so it opens out to hold a full batch of biscuits or a couple of loaf tins, then folds down again once everything’s cooled and boxed up.

Good to know: like most cross wire racks, the gaps between the bars are big enough for a small biscuit or a cherry to slip through if you’re not paying attention lifting things off. Fine for cakes and loaves, worth a steady hand for anything tiny. Again, we’re going on the listing here rather than our own testing.

Measuring spoons that live on the fridge, not in a drawer

Small kitchens tend to have one drawer doing the work of three, and loose measuring spoons are exactly the sort of thing that ends up jammed at the back of it, minus the one size you actually need. KitchenCraft’s Easy Store spoons get round that by being magnetic. It’s a set of four stainless steel spoons, each one dual sided, so you get eight measurements out of four spoons, and they either nest together in one stack or stick to the side of the fridge instead of needing their own drawer space.

None of this is really about Halloween, if we’re honest. It’s about not letting one day in October land you with kit that spends the next eleven months in the way. Buy things that fold flat, or that do a job you’ll actually use again in November, and the pumpkins can come and go without leaving a mess behind.

A quick note on the pictures in this post: they’re illustrations of what each type of product generally looks like, not photos of the exact items, so the real thing will look a little different.

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