Tricks of the Trade

About author / Rebecca Michaels

Queen of the desserts and pastry chef extraordinaire; graduate French Culinary Institute; Golden Scoop Award winner; Flying Monkey Bakery founder

This week I want to share my favorite place to buy pastry tools with you. A fancy cake decorating supply store? A gourmet cooking shop somewhere in New York? Somewhere in France?

Well, yes. I do make purchases from those types of shops, but there's one place I bet you never even considered looking for some of your pastry needs: the hardware store.

No kidding, you say? What could a delicate flower of a pastry chef possibly want from a hardware store?

Believe it or not, you can find lots of goodies to help in your pastry kitchen at your everyday round-the-corner handyman's shop.

Here are some of my favorite items.

Trowel or spackle applicator: You know, those spatulas for applying cement or spackle. The flat edged ones are great for scraping hardened chocolate or dough off of your countertops (be careful, though. You might scratch it depending on what type of surface it is) and for the tabling method of tempering chocolate. The smaller toothed ones are the perfect cake combs. Use them to create textured stripes and swirls in your frosting. You'll find all different shapes, sizes and widths. Play around. They're cheaper than the 'cake comb.'

PVC tubing: If you're working with chocolate, these can come in handy. If you want to shape curls or create tubes of tempered chocolate for fancier cake decorating or sculptures, just wash the tubing thoroughly, apply your chocolate and wait until the chocolate hardens. Pull off slowly, or if you're making tubes, carefully cut the tubing off of the chocolate.

Lucite: Use a piece of Lucite to practice your piping skills. Place it over your template and pipe or write away. Wipe it off with a wet paper towel and start again! Much better than using parchment paper because you can see straight through it and it's economically friendly.

Propane torch: The piece de resistance of any pastry chef's tool collection. It's also my guy friends' favorite toy to play with. I swear by the hardware store version. In my opinion, those teeny chef's torches are useless: they aren't hot enough, they need to constantly be refilled and they are expensive. Workhorse propane torches are half the price, four times as large and a LOT more powerful (My lawyer says to make it clear that this is a piece of equipment that should be used by adults with CAUTION). Be sure to get one that has the ignition button and not the kind that you light a match to. This baby will last a very long time, even with lots of use. And they're not just for your crème brulees either. Fan a low flame lightly over your gorgeous mounds of meringue on your lemon meringue pie for a nice light brown finish or to release an ice cream cake, bombe, or mousse cake from its pan.

So these handy items should get you started. Do make sure you wash everything you intend to use on food thoroughly. Have fun and use common sense!