The Genius Cooling Rack Alternative You Can Use In A Pinch

Baking can be a stressful task if you're not a natural, and baking a lot of something can have you shaking in your shoes. But once you have the oven situation decided on (a staggered approach, no doubt, with sheet trays going in in groups), you'll have to figure out where you're going to put all those trays to cool once they're out of the oven. With only a few cooling racks on hand, what else can you use?

How about this genius idea: take a metal muffin tin and flip it over so that the six (or however many) muffin insets are sticking upward. Set your cookie tray or cake pan — or even your cast iron skillet — on top of those insets and pat yourself on the back, because you've just made baking in bulk a lot easier on yourself.

Mind, this won't work with silicone muffin tins, since they're not as stiff as metal ones. The last thing you need is to rest a hot-out-of-the-oven cake layer on it, only to have the silicone muffin tin buckle under the weight and send your pan crashing to the ground.

Of course, if you're not a big baker and you don't have muffin tins laying around, there are tons of other everyday kitchen items you use as a makeshift cooling rack for that spur-of-the-moment weekend dump cake. The first one is your removable gas stove grates, since they're metal, raised, and provide plenty of space for air to circulate in and around your baking tray. For smaller baked goods that you're pulling out of the oven, you can use the metal rings that secure the lids on Mason jars, or if they're not currently in use, place your hot trays onto a few metal cookie cutters.

In the same vein as the muffin tins, if your hot pan isn't super heavy or large, try resting it on an overturned egg carton (make sure it's empty, of course). You can also create your own makeshift grates out of aluminum foil. Tear off a sheet and crumple into a loose ball, then uncrumple, flattening it out just a bit so that it can rest on your counter; place baked goods on top (the crinkles in the foil will provide ventilation). Or you can tear off a few sheets, roll them up or twist them up and use them as is, long and straight, or bend them into coils for, say, cake pans (you can listen for the singing to let you know they're done).