Aluminum foil is a staple in many households and we all use it when baking in the oven. It’s a favourite amongst those trying to avoid washing the baking sheets every time they use one. But did you know that tinfoil can actually be used for many other things than just preventing your oven from getting dirty? Here are some of the more unusual and yet very useful ways you can use aluminum foil in your day to day life.
1. DIY Cake Pan
Let’s start in the familiar aluminum foil territory – in the kitchen. If you want to bake a cake that’s not a standard shape, you don’t have to buy a special cake pan just to use it once. You can just use aluminum foil and fold it into a shape that you need.
2. Soften Brown Sugar
If you need brown sugar for baking you know that sometimes it just hardens into lumps that feel as hard as a rock. The best way to soften that sugar is to wrap it in tinfoil and put in the oven on high for 5 minutes. Be careful unwrapping it though, it’ll be hot.
3. Makeshift Piping Bag
If you want to pipe frosting or cream onto a cake or cupcakes but you’ve run out of piping bags don’t rush to cut corners of ziplock bags. You can just fashion aluminum foil into a funnel and then use it as a piping bag.
4. Sharpen Scissors
If your kitchen scissors are getting dull and you feel like they’re bruising your herbs instead of cutting them, try this trick. You can sharpen your scissors with tin foil. All you need to do is cut the tinfoil with scissors a few times and they will become sharper. Test it out!
5. Protect Pies From Burning
Baking a perfect pie is tricky business, you need to leave it in the oven long enough so that the filling cooks through and the bottom of the crust gets cooked, but sometimes the top of the pie gets way more brown than the perfect golden we’d prefer. In order to prevent that you can put aluminum foil on top of the pie crust to protect it from burning, and just take it off closer to the end of the baking.
6. Clean Silver
You can use tinfoil to clean silver, and that includes both silverware and silver jewelry. If you have some silverware or jewelry that’s going all tarnished and dark here’s a great tip that’s quick and requires minimal effort. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil, add a few tablespoons of salt and baking soda, lay your silverware on top and cover with water. Let it sit for 5 to 10 minutes and rinse afterwards. You don’t even need to rub anything. The chemical reaction will do all the work for you.
7. Clean Up The Iron
If you feel like your iron is getting dirty and it has a bunch of weird marks on the plate and sometimes will stick to clothes, all you need to do to clean it is iron some aluminum foil. You’ll be surprised to see that just in a couple of passes your iron will be clean as new and super shiny.
8. Scrub The Grime Away
You can use crumpled up tin foil to scrub away the grime on your baking sheet or scrub up the burned parts on your cast iron frying pan. It’s also quite useful for cleaning the grill grates and the baking wire rack and scrub your pots clean in the same way.
9. Ironing More Efficiently
If you have clothes that get super wrinkly and you have to spend ages going over the same place with the iron, here’s a way you can make your life a bit easier. Just put a layer of tinfoil under the cover of your ironing board. When you iron your clothes, the heat will be reflected right back, so it’s like ironing your clothes on both sides at once.