Last Friday I was baking cookies for our church, Awaken’s pumpkin painting event at the Coachman, a homeless shelter for families in White Plains, NY. While I was baking I was using a bunch of items from my shower that I really loved and made baking so much easier. So I thought I should so share this and thus came the baking edition!

First off a good rolling pin is great for cookies and pies. In college I had a wooden one and I missed my mom’s marble one. So when we registered for the wedding I made sure to register for a marble one. The weight is wonderful and it’s so much easier to clean than wood!

I wasn’t so sure about registering for a second beater for my KichenAid but I figured I registered for a second bowl so why not a second beater? (I didn’t want to have to keep washing bowls while I was baking.) Well this little KitchenAid Flex Edge Beater turned out to be wonderful!! It wipes the bowl while it mixes! So no more stopping the beater and lifting the whole top to wipe the bowl! I even used it for mashed potatoes last night!

So as almost everyone at the shower knew, I love to bake! Therefore I got all kinds of baking kits! In one of the kits was this little box of gel food colors. Now I didn’t think anything of it until I was mixing colors for icing last week. Now I normally use the McCormick Food Color that you can easily get from the grocery store. But what I’ve found is it doesn’t mix as nicely as the gel. Plus the gel gives you much more vibrant colors!

I talked about the silicone cups when I did the ice cream cupcakes post. The reason I love these little babies is because you can reuse them! Have you ever had to make cupcakes last minute and realized you don’t have any liners? Then you have to run out in your sweatpants without any makeup on at 10 pm to pick some up…but I’m not speaking from experience ;0) Anyways they’re also dishwasher safe (who else hates doing dishes?) and you’re helping out the Earth a little bit!

This last one is one of my favorites!! It’s a expandable cake/cupcake carrier! The Progressive Collapsible Cupcake & Cake Carrier is wonderful for transporting those baked treats! There are two layers of trays that cupcakes can be easily set in then the lid is expanded or you can place a cake on the flat surface. I love it! In fact, I’ll look for an excuse to use it!

And here’s how the cookies turned out! Aren’t they cute!?!

And here’s the pumpkins the kidos painted! They seemed to have a good time :0)