How to Organize Your Baking Area

This is how I like to organize my baking space. I love-love-love my baking area. Organizing this way, makes it so much easier to find things. The key to this is: the more drawers, the better. Sub-organizing inside of these drawers with more containers; even better. I'm very OCD and if you're not the organized type of personality (most bakers are), I would suggest not getting drawers that you can see through. I'm a very visual guy and obssessed with displaying everything. It's actually fun for me to keep up with making it organized. If that sound like something that'll make you go crazy, then I'd stick with drawers and cabinets that you can't see through and just organize internally.

Below are descriptions on how I like to sort out my schtuff. This is just one part to my baking area. This does not include the pantry area, baking pans, and food colors.

1. Cupcake Liners in all sizes, colors and patterns. I like to put the most used liners in the front. I also like to have extra loaf liners for quick breads, muffin liners for panettone etc. in this drawer. It's always good to collect in different styles; you never know when you're going to need that specific color/pattern on the fly.

2. Sprinkles, gold Dusts, Pixie Dusts, edible glitters non pareils, and candies. I also have vials of Luster Dusts and a spectrum of colors of Petal Dusts. I like to organize them by colors of Warms, Cools and Metallics.

3. Kitchen Towels and Cheesecloth. Notice how they're on the top right corner of the table? That makes it easy for me to just pull a rag right out and use it.

4. Ribbons galore. One of the biggest tips is to always collect ribbon in all shades, textures and patterns. You never know when you're going to need that certain style of ribbon to tie almost anything. You're going to thank yourself later, when you have that emergency gift or cake base that you need to put a ribbon on and don't want to make a gazillion trips to every craft store to find a coordinating ribbon. Oh, and I also keep my baker's twine in here.

5. Glass condiment/ingredient bowls, straws, Boba straws, dowels for cake stacking and plastic (microwavable) containers for Buttercream mixing, storage for fillings etc. You know, the kind that you get your potato salad in from the deli. I always love having these plastic containers in different sizes. I always need them to store egg whites, melt chocolate in etc. I suggest buying them at Smart and Final or Costco; you'll need a ton of these.

6. Parchment rolls, wax paper, silicone mats, Silpats, and anything silicone for baking.

7. Airbrush accessories and paint palettes.

8. Dry and Liquid measuring tools, Kitchen Aid attachments, whisks, serrated knives, rolling pins etc.

9. Ramekins

10. That's a giant box of glassine bags. In this drawer, I keep all sizes and shapes of gusseted and non-gusseted glassine, cello and clear Polypropylene bags. I also keep twist ties in differerent colors and metallics in here.

11. This is where I keep the more smaller baking tools, like scoops, confectionary dipping tines, tips etc. Oh, I also keep my blow torches in here, since there's some extra space.

12. Foils and wraps in different colors. I like to use these to cover cake drum bases (even though I always cover them in fondant, it just covers them in a cute color, because you see the bottom too!) These foils come in handy when you want to cover up a drab base board for your goodie gifts as well.

Think about your entire space and flow. What would you reach for more often and not so often? What would you bend down for less occasionally and what would you want at arms length? Those are things to think about when organizing your space. And of course, there is sub organization inside the drawers as well: not just pronouncing what each drawer is used for. It sounds like a lot of work, but well worth it in the end. It's fun! Go to the Container Store and the dollar store and find a bunch of containers to put your things in. It's such a fun project; trust me. I hope this inspires you to organize your own baking area!

Cheers to an organized, new you in 2015!

Greggy