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Baking Tip: Creating a Parchment Paper Sling

Part of my job here at Stonewall Kitchen is preparing food for photographs. As you can imagine, the images we need for packaging or on our website need to look perfect as well as delicious. Here’s a little trick that I use that you may find useful too. When baking brownies, lemon bars, or basically any baked good cooked in a square or rectangular pan, I find that using a parchment sling makes it easier to cut the baked good and keep your pan from getting ruined by cut marks made by the knife.

Equipment needed:

• Baking pan
• Nonstick parchment paper (if not nonstick, grease this as well), or foil
• Bench scraper or knife
• Cutting board

Instructions:

1. Grease the pan.
2. Cut a piece of parchment paper as wide as the pan and long enough to overhang the edges of the pan by 2-inches. Some people like to use two slings placed perpendicular to each other in the pan, but I find one piece works well most often.
3. Make batter according to recipe instructions. Spread batter in pan without disturbing the parchment.
4. Bake according to recipe instructions. Cool.
5. Run knife or bench scraper along edge where the baked good touches the pan to loosen.
6. Gently remove the baked good out of the pan by holding onto the parchment paper and lifting. Place on a cutting board.
7. Cut baked good into squares using a knife or bench scraper.

Additional tips-

• If cutting something like fudge, cheesecake or lemon bars rinse the bench scraper or knife with warm water and dry with a towel several times during the process to assure a clean cut.
• If your baked good has cooled and is stuck in the pan and will not lift out turn your stove burner on low and run the bottom of the pan over the heat source in a circular motion for 5-10 seconds. Use oven mitts if the pan gets hot. The baked good will warm slightly and should lift out of the pan easily.