Vintage 25 Pc Ateco Cake Decorating Set In Metal Container
- Gifts
- Holiday Decorating
The Best Holiday Cookie Baking Equipment and Gear
By
Wirecutter Staff
Updated October 12, 2021
The weather outside may be frightful, but we want your holiday cookies to be delightful. The tools you use can make all the difference, allowing your dough to bake evenly and your decorations to shine. We spent 200 hours researching and testing 20 types of cookie-related essentials to find the best gear to make holiday baking fun and stress-free.
Why you should trust us
In compiling this guide, we sought advice from renowned bakers such as Alice Medrich, author of books like Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies and most recently Flavor Flours; Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of Rose's Christmas Cookies and The Baking Bible, among others; Matt Lewis, cookbook author and co-owner of New York's popular Baked; and Gail Dosik, cookie-decorating expert and former owner of New York's One Tough Cookie. Wirecutter senior editor Marguerite Preston, who wrote one of the first versions of this guide, is a former professional baker, which means she has spent many hours scooping cookies and many more hours piping decorations. Over that time, she developed a keen sense of what's practical, what's essential, and what just doesn't work.
Measuring and prep
Mixing bowls
Our pick
Our pick
Mixing bowls are often one of the first things we pull out of the cupboard at the start of a baking project. Even if you're using a stand mixer with its included bowl, you usually need at least one extra bowl for your dry ingredients. A good set of mixing bowls can also come in handy if you're mixing several different colors of icing. We recommend simple, sturdy sets in stainless steel or glass.
Stainless steel bowls are lightweight and practically indestructible. After testing seven stainless steel sets for our guide to the best mixing bowls, we chose the Cuisinart Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls with Lids set as the best. These bowls are durable, attractive, versatile, and easy to hold with one hand, and they have tight-fitting lids for storing leftovers. And unlike some other bowls we tested, they're both deep enough to contain splatters from a hand mixer and wide enough to allow for folding ingredients together easily. The Cuisinart bowls come in a set of three sizes: 1½, 3, and 5 quarts. The middle size is great for mixing up a batch of icing, and the largest bowl should be just right for making a standard batch of cookies.
The big advantage of glass bowls is that they can go in the microwave, which is great for tasks like melting chocolate. Glass bowls are heavier than metal bowls, though, so they're harder to pick up with one hand, but you may like the extra stability. And glass, of course, is not as durable as steel, but the bowls in our favorite Pyrex Smart Essentials 8-Piece Mixing Bowl Set are made of tempered glass, which doesn't shatter as easily. The Pyrex bowls come in a set of four useful sizes (1, 1½, 2½, and 4 quarts) and are equipped with lids, so you can store a batch of cookie dough in the fridge or keep icing from drying out.
Scale
Our pick
Escali Primo Digital Scale
The best kitchen scale
The affordably priced Escali scale is best for most home cooks who want consistent results when baking and cooking. Impressively accurate, it reads weights quickly in increments of 1 gram and has a long auto-off function of about four minutes.
Buying Options
Most professional bakers swear by the kitchen scale. The delicate alchemy of baking relies on precision, and cups—which measure only by volume—can be wildly inaccurate. As Alton Brown explains (video), 1 cup of flour can equal 4 to 6 ounces depending on who measures it and on factors like relative humidity. A scale can mean the difference between light, buttery cookies and dense, floury ones—plus, you can measure all your ingredients right into the bowl, so you have fewer dishes to clean.
After putting in nearly 45 hours of research and three years of testing, as well as interviewing experts, for our guide to the best kitchen scale, we think the Escali Primo Digital Scale is the best scale for most people. The Escali scale is impressively accurate and reads weights quickly in 1-gram increments. It's also affordably priced and easy to use and store, and it has a long battery life. Of the models we tested, this scale had the longest auto-off function, so you can take your time measuring. This 11-pound-capacity kitchen scale is ideal for all your basic home baking and cooking needs. Plus, it comes with a limited lifetime warranty.
For larger batches, we recommend the My Weigh KD8000. It's bulky, and it measures only in full grams, but it easily accommodates high-quantity baking with a capacity of 17.56 pounds.
Measuring cups
Our pick
Our pick
Until American recipe writers abandon the imprecise convention of the cup, most home bakers will want measuring cups in their toolbox. It's worth owning both a set of metal dry cups and a glass liquid-measuring cup: flour and other dry ingredients mound, so cups with flat rims work best for scooping and leveling, whereas liquids level themselves, so measuring against a fixed line on a clear container works best.
Note that the Simply Gourmet measuring cups are a clone, or a white-label product—there's one manufacturer that makes them, and they're sold under various brand names at various retailers. There's no "original brand," but we chose the Simply Gourmet cups when we published our guide because that set was the best deal, offering seven cups (the seventh is a small but useful ⅛ cup size) instead of the usual six. If the Simply Gourmet set is out of stock at the time you're shopping, you can purchase an identical seven-cup set by KitchenMade or a similar six-cup set by Hudson Essentials or Lee Valley.
Fine-mesh strainer
A simple, fine-mesh strainer is a great multiuse tool to have on hand when you're baking. You can use it to sift your flour (which aerates the flour to prevent overly dense results, especially if you're using measuring cups instead of a scale), remove clumps from cocoa, or combine multiple ingredients at once. A small strainer can also come in handy when you're decorating, if you want to dust your cookies with powdered sugar or cocoa powder (with or without a stencil).
We didn't test strainers, but we did get a few good recommendations from other sources. Many of our experts suggested choosing a set that includes several sizes.
Matt Lewis, co-owner of Baked, likes the sturdy All-Clad 3-Piece Stainless-Steel Strainer Set; he told us his set has "stood the test of time," even in the kitchens of his high-volume bakery. But at $100 currently, the All-Clad set is a real investment. If you aren't planning to run your strainers through the wringer, you may want to consider the affordable Cuisinart Set of 3 Mesh Strainers instead. The mesh is not as fine as on the All-Clad set, and some reviews note that the basket can bend or warp, but the Cuisinart strainers are dishwasher safe, and for most reviewers, they seem to have held up well under regular use. If you plan to use your strainers only occasionally or just for baking, the Cuisinart set will set you back just $13 (at this writing) and should serve you just fine.
One thing that multiple experts told us to avoid at all costs: old-fashioned, crank-operated flour sifters. Such tools don't hold as much as a large strainer does, can't strain anything besides dry ingredients like flour, and become difficult to clean, with the moving parts easily getting gummed up. As Lewis put it, "They're messy, they're silly, and it's a device you really don't need in your kitchen."
Mixing
Stand mixer
Our pick
A good stand mixer will make your baking (and cooking) life a lot easier. The KitchenAid Artisan is the best mixer for the home baker who's looking for an equipment upgrade. We've covered mixers since 2013, and after using them to make cookies, cakes, and bread for our guide to the best stand mixers, we can definitively say that the brand that rolled out the first tabletop mixer, in 1919, is still the best. We've used the KitchenAid Artisan mixer in our test kitchen for years, proving that sometimes you really can't beat a classic. The Artisan isn't cheap, but since refurbished units are often available, it can be an affordable machine. And for the money, the KitchenAid Artisan can't be beat in performance and versatility.
Hand mixer
Our pick
That said, stand mixers weigh quite a bit and have a large footprint on a countertop, and a quality machine costs hundreds of dollars. If you need a mixer for making only a few batches of cookies a year or for whipping egg whites for royal icing, you can probably get by with a hand mixer. And after spending over 20 hours researching and testing for our guide to the best hand mixers, we recommend the Breville Handy Mix Scraper. It churns through dense cookie doughs and quickly whips delicate batters and pillowy meringues, and it comes with more useful attachments and features that cheaper mixers lack.
Whisks
Our pick
Whisks come in all shapes and sizes: big balloon whisks for whipping cream, long narrow ones for cooking custards, teeny tiny ones for frothing the milk in your coffee. For making cookies, however, you won't be using such a tool for much more than whisking dry ingredients or making icing, so a narrow, medium-size whisk will do. All of the experts we've spoken to about whisks have emphasized that those shaped like tornadoes or equipped with metal balls rattling around inside the wires don't perform any better than the simple, sturdy teardrop-shaped models.
After testing nine whisks for our guide to the best whisk, we think the OXO Good Grips 11-Inch Balloon Whisk is the best for handling a wide variety of tasks. In our tests, it whipped cream and egg whites faster than most of the other whisks we tried, reached easily into the corners of pots, and offered the most comfortable handle. Our only complaint is that the rubbery TPE-coated handle isn't entirely heatproof: It will melt if you rest it too long on the edge of a hot pan. But that shouldn't be an issue for making cookies (or a lot of other whisking tasks), so we don't think it's a dealbreaker.
If you do want a whisk with a heatproof handle, we also like the simple Winco 12-Inch Stainless Steel Piano Wire Whip. It costs slightly less than the OXO does, but it's still sturdy and well made. The Winco made quick work of whipping cream in our tests, and it was easy to maneuver around a small saucepan. The smooth stainless steel handle isn't as comfortable as the OXO's, but it's still perfectly fine, especially for simple tasks like whisking dry ingredients.
Silicone spatula
Our pick
For baking cookies, a good, sturdy silicone spatula is essential. It should be stiff and thick enough to press dough together but flexible enough to scrape down the sides of a bowl with ease. Silicone is the material of choice over old-fashioned rubber because it's food-safe, heatproof, and nonstick, so you can use the spatula for melting butter or chocolate as well as for mixing, and sticky doughs slide right off (plus, you can throw the spatula into the dishwasher).
In our guide to the best spatulas, we found the GIR Ultimate Spatula to be the best of the silicone bunch. It consists of a single piece of silicone, so it's dishwasher safe and easy to clean, and it's available in a rainbow of colors. The small head is slim enough to fit into a peanut butter jar but comfortable and quick to use in a curved pot. It also has parallel edges that can scrape down the straight sides of a pot or sauté pan. Though the tip is thick enough to give the spatula heft for pressing down doughs, it's also flexible enough to glide smoothly and cleanly around the edges of a batter bowl.
Rolling and cutting dough
Bench scraper
You'll find a bench scraper in every professional kitchen. They're good for everything from trimming rolled-out dough to scooping up chopped nuts to cutting butter into flour for pie crust—and even just for scraping a surface clean. When you're baking cookies, a bench scraper can come in handy for all of the above tasks, plus it's perfect for picking up cut-out cookies and transferring them to a baking sheet.
Rolling pin
Our pick
You can't make cut-out cookies without a rolling pin. If you already own one that you like, you needn't fret over getting a better one: The best rolling pin is the one that you are comfortable with. However, it may be time to upgrade if you find yourself struggling with sticking or cracking dough, a pin (or a makeshift one like a wine bottle) that's difficult to maneuver, or a handled pin that spins in place instead of rolling smoothly across the surface.
In our testing for our guide to the best rolling pins, the timeless maple Whetstone Woodenware French Rolling Pin proved to be a superior tool and a great value. Its long, tapered shape pivots easily, so it's ideal for rolling perfect rounds of crust for pie and more-oblong shapes for cookies. Compared with the surface of a basic mass-produced rolling pin, this pin's hard maple surface has a smoother finish, which keeps dough from sticking and makes the pin easy to clean. Though the Whetstone pin is a steal compared with other similar hand-turned models, if you're an occasional baker looking for something less expensive (or if the Whetstone is sold out), consider the JK Adams 19-inch Wooden Rolling Dowel. Our 10-year-old tester found this pin easy to use, too. Without tapered ends, however, the JK Adams pin isn't as agile as the Whetstone pin, so it's slightly awkward for rolling out round shapes. And because the surface of the pin was not as smooth as that of our main pick, in our tests it required more dustings of flour and more effort to clean.
Cookie cutters
Our pick
Our pick
Our pick
Especially if you're shopping for your first cookie cutters, we've found that buying sets is easier (and more cost-efficient) than sorting through a dizzying variety of individual cutters. For holiday baking, we like Ateco's range of stainless steel cookie cutters, either the Ateco Stainless Steel Christmas Cookie Cutters or the Ateco 5-Piece Stainless Steel Snowflake Cutter Set. The shapes are clear and elegant, and of all the cutters we tested, the Ateco pieces offered the sturdiest construction and cut the cleanest cookies.
The Ateco cookie cutters had the heaviest-gauge metal of any we tested, and the difference was immediately noticeable. Many other metal cookie cutters—like those from the R & M Holiday Season Classics 12-Piece Cookie Cutter Tub—are made of tin or tin-plated steel and are easy to bend out of shape. The Ateco cutters, while not impossible to bend, were thicker and more resilient in our tests, as they required significant force to bend even a little. The seam of each Ateco cutter was also welded in more places than on the other metal cutters, making the Ateco designs less likely to break. Tin-plated cutters are more vulnerable to rust, too, but after many uses, our Ateco cutters are still gleaming.
The Ateco Christmas cutters are the smallest of all we tried, measuring on average 2½ inches from end to end, as opposed to 3½ or 4 inches, but that shouldn't be a dealbreaker unless you have your heart set on cookies the size of your hand. If that's the case, go for the snowflakes set or the Ateco 10-Piece Stainless Steel Star Cutter set; those sets have cutters ranging from 1½ inches to 5 or 7½ inches, respectively.
For baking with children, we recommend the Wilton 101-Piece Cookie Cutter Set. It's a great deal, and the huge variety—ranging from letters to animals to several holiday images—means it can handle just about any cookie-cutting project your child wants to do. They're plastic, so they're not as sharp as metal cutters for pushing into cold or frozen dough. But they have a wide upper lip, which makes them more comfortable to push down hard on (our young tester gave them a few hard smacks, which was probably excessive, but fun for her).
If you're short on space, or if 101 cutters seems like overkill, we also like Wilton's Holiday Grippy Cookie Cutters. This set of four plastic cutters felt sturdy, and we liked the silicone grip, which made them more comfortable to use. The holiday shapes are nearly identical to some of those in the 101-piece set, and they would be great for kids, but they just don't come in enough variety to make them our top choice. Aside from this Christmas-themed set, Wilton offers an "everyday" set of four cutters in the Comfort Grip model.
Cookie scoops
Our pick
A cookie scoop can be a game-changer if you're used to portioning out drop cookies like chocolate chip or oatmeal by hand. A good scoop sweeps the contents out with a squeeze of the handle, turning out consistent, perfectly rounded domes of cookie dough (or muffin or cupcake batter) with ease.
Cookie scoops can vary in build and quality. We like the ones with V-shaped handles better than those with just a thumb lever, since V-shaped handles work for both left- and right-handers and are easier to squeeze. It's important to invest in a good, sturdy scoop, or else you'll quickly run into more frustration and mess than you would shaping cookies by hand. Of the five scoops we tested, the Norpro Grip-EZ 2-Tablespoon Stainless Scoop was the easiest to squeeze and the most comfortable to hold, and it released both hard, straight-from-the-fridge dough and sticky, room-temperature dough more cleanly than any other scoop.
The OXO Good Grips Medium Cookie Scoop is also very high quality and has great reviews on Amazon. The squeeze action is smooth and easy, the handles are comfortable, and the tool is sturdy and reliable. When we scooped soft, sticky dough, the Norpro model released just a little more cleanly. Still, the OXO is almost the same price as the Norpro, and it's a good option if the Norpro isn't available. Both brands' scoops come in multiple other sizes, too, so you can make giant cookies or tiny cookies if you prefer.
Baking
Cookie sheet
Our pick
A high-quality baking sheet can improve the quality of your cookies, and it doesn't have to cost a lot. If you choose one with rims, it can serve as a great all-purpose pan for many other culinary tasks, too, such as roasting vegetables, baking bread, and browning granola.
After spending hours baking several kinds of cookies, pissaladière, and sweet potato fries for our guide to the best baking sheet, we think the Nordic Ware Natural Aluminum Commercial Baker's Half Sheet is the best choice for baking all kinds of cookies. Made of heavy-gauge aluminum, it didn't warp in our tests, even at high heat. It baked on a par with or more evenly than the other sheets we tested, and after six months of heavy use, it still performs really well.
If you're a fan of rimless sheets for baking cookies, we recommend the Vollrath Wear-Ever Cookie Sheet. This heavy-gauge sheet has two raised handles on the short ends, which make it easy to rotate in the oven. It baked all of our cookies nicely, if a little slower than the other sheets. We still think the Nordic Ware half sheet is a better overall value, but if you don't want rims, the Vollrath won't disappoint.
Parchment paper
By far the best and easiest way to keep your cookies from sticking to the pan is to line the pan with a simple sheet of parchment paper. It's inexpensive, you can cut it to fit your baking (or cooking) project, and you can slide it right onto the cooling rack with your baked goods. Then you can just place a new sheet down on the next pan and pop your next batch into the oven.
Nonstick Silpat baking mats get a lot of hype, and they're excellent for certain projects, especially sticky ones like toffee. But their slippery surfaces can change how your cookies bake, and when you're cleaning them, it can be difficult to get all the grease off. They're also expensive, so you might not want to buy more than a couple, which can limit how quickly you can move from one batch of cookies to the next.
We haven't found any significant differences between parchment paper brands, so just get whatever is readily available at your local grocery store. If you worry about environmental impact, Beyond Gourmet makes a good-quality unbleached parchment paper.
Cooling racks
Our pick
A cooling rack will help your cookies cool quickly and efficiently, and it can come in handy while you're decorating. The 12-by-17-inch Sur La Table Stainless Steel Cooling Grid is the best rack we've tested. It fits well in a half-sheet baking pan, a handy arrangement when you're drizzling cookies with glaze or dipping them in chocolate because the excess can drip off into the pan, without pooling around the base of the cookies. It's one of the few racks we've found that are oven safe up to 450 °F and dishwasher safe. In addition, the Sur La Table rack is sturdier than most other racks we've tested, and its tight grid pattern (as opposed to parallel wires) doesn't let cookies bend or fall through. Since it's so durable, the rack doesn't buckle in the middle when holding cake layers, either.
Decorating
Offset spatula
Our pick
For decorating cookies, a small offset spatula can be convenient, and it doesn't cost much. Its shape makes it much more adept than a butter knife at spreading frosting or chocolate evenly over a cookie. But it's also a good multitasker, and it does a great job of getting things off a cookie sheet. When you're not baking cookies, you can use the spatula to slather your sandwiches with mustard and mayonnaise. Real Simple praises the small Ateco Offset Spatula, writing, "Try it once and you'll call it indispensable."
Piping bags
Our pick
Also great
If you're looking to get fancy with your cookie decorating (video), it's time to graduate from Ziploc bags. Piping bags and a set of tips (and a little practice, of course) will allow you to draw smooth, precise lines with royal frosting or chocolate. For holiday cookie decorating, disposable plastic piping bags are the way to go because they make for easy cleanup and you'll be able to use many different colors of frosting at once. Of the bags that sell in smaller quantities for home bakers, we like the 10-pack of Ateco's Soft Disposable Decorating Bags (18-Inch).
You won't find all that many types of disposable pastry bags, but they do vary in quality, and for the home baker the Ateco bags are the best option. Cookie-decorating expert Gail Dosik told us the Ateco bags are her favorite because they're "very pliable" as opposed to the more crinkly bags from Wilton or Cake Boss. Also notable: The outside of the Ateco bags is slightly tacky—not sticky, but grippy, similar to Glad Press'n Seal plastic wrap. This feature offers an advantage, especially when you're working with greasy buttercream, because it helps keep the bag from slipping in your hands, which can turn decorating into a frustrating and messy struggle.
Should you decide to take the plunge, 100-packs of pastry bags are definitely a better deal. Our favorite bulk pack, the DayMark Piping Pal Disposable Pastry Bag with Dispenser box, currently costs about $20 for 100 of the 18-inch or 12-inch size, only three times as much as the 10-pack of 18-inch Ateco bags. Although Ateco also sells bags in quantities of 100, finding those packs for as good of a price is difficult, and the bags don't come on a roll in a dispenser box like the DayMark bags do.
One hundred bags is a lot, but with some pastry tips, the bags can help pretty up things besides cookies, such as the filling for deviled eggs, the mashed potato topping on a shepherd's pie, or even cheese on crackers for hors d'oeuvres. We can't recommend the enormous box for everyone, but if you're creative and fond of spending time in the kitchen, you might just find a lot of uses for a large supply of pastry bags.
Piping tips
Our pick
You can simply cut the tip off a pastry bag (if it's disposable) to pipe a line of whatever width you desire, but if you want to pipe anything besides a straight line—or even if you just want to pipe a rounder, cleaner line—you should get a basic set of piping tips. If you're using a thick frosting like buttercream, these pieces allow you to make stars, rosettes, leaves, and basket weaves, too.
After speaking to our experts and trying three sets of piping tips, we found a clear winner: the Ateco 14-Piece Cake Decorating Set. It actually comes with only 12 tips, because the total count of pieces includes a plastic coupler and a 12-inch reusable plastic piping bag, but this set still offers all the variety you need for most basic (and some advanced) decorating tasks. The plastic coupler, once inserted into the bag, allows you to screw on piping tips from the outside so that you can swap them easily without needing to dump out the icing. The seamless tips ensure the icing is smooth, and the tips themselves are less likely to rust.
The Ateco tips also felt sturdy and difficult to bend in our tests, and we liked that the set came in a hard plastic box for storage, because without somewhere safe to keep them, piping tips are likely to roll away or get lost very quickly.
Food coloring
Our pick
Food coloring can make cookie decorating more fun (especially for kids) and more elaborate, but you can find much better options than the watery liquid McCormick sets available in most grocery stores. The best, AmeriColor Student Soft Gel Paste Food Color, not only offers way more color options than the basic red, yellow, green, and blue but also comes in a much more concentrated formula than liquid coloring. As a result, it lasts longer, produces more vibrant hues, and runs less risk of throwing off your recipes with excess liquid. In our tests, its colors were the truest of all we tried, and they come in squeeze bottles that make them much easier to use than the concentrated gels that come in little jars.
If you have concerns about using artificial colorings due to allergies or other reasons, one good set of all-natural food colorings, the India Tree Nature's Colors Decorating Set, is widely available. The set includes only three colors—red, blue, and yellow, produced from beet, red cabbage, and turmeric, respectively—but they're surprisingly true and vibrant. The set also has a few issues: It's expensive, for one thing, and in the package we received from Amazon, the yellow bottle had leaked a little. The colors tend to settle to the bottom and need shaking before use. And they don't contain preservatives, so as many Amazon reviewers point out, they tend to become less effective over time. You may not get wild, electric colors out of this set, but if you're devoted to keeping things natural, this set of colors is a great way to go.
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Vintage 25 Pc Ateco Cake Decorating Set In Metal Container
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-holiday-cookie-baking-equipment-and-gear/
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