• Managing at home tags

Baking has seen a huge surge in popularity since The Great British Bake Off came to our screens. And sight loss doesn’t need to stop you from creating masterpieces in the kitchen.  Here we share a range of tips to help you make your own signature bakes with confidence.

Before you start, make your workspace clear and clutter free, with your tools to hand and laid out in the order you will be using them. If you have useful vision, good lighting is important and having utensils in different colours is a great way to identify your spoons from your spatulas.

Also consider contrast: if you have a dark worktop, use a light chopping board. If you have a light chopping board, use a dark handled knife and so on. A chopping board with a funnel end is very useful when directing food into a pan or bowl.

Preheat your oven. You can adapt standard equipment to work for you by adding Bump-ons, Tactimark or high-vis tape. These aids give you a highly visible or tactile indicator of things, such as frequently used temperature settings.

Next let’s get weighing! Many with sight loss prefer the use of talking scales, even for liquids, finding this much easier than measuring jugs.

Once all your ingredients are measured, it’s time to mix or beat together the ingredients in a large bowl. You can check consistency of doughs, or mixtures by using touch and taste. Once your mixtures are ready, place them into your baking tray or tin, using a spatula or your fingers to spread out evenly.

Finally, it is time to bake. You can find fantastic silicone baking trays and moulds in bright contrasting colours for ease of locating in cupboards. Be sure to set a loud timer for your bakes, timing is everything!

We all know the best bit is enjoying eating your baking once it’s done, but even more so after achieving some baking at home with confidence!

Baking Top Tips!

Find yourself a sturdy apron with pockets, which can help keep items to hand whilst moving around the kitchen.

Oven mitts which go to the elbow are a good way to avoid arm burns when manoeuvring in and out of ovens.

Have a large bowl of hot, soapy water at the ready for hand cleaning. This will make it much faster than reaching for the taps every time you need to rinse off.

To avoid constantly referring to recipes, consider a voice recording device like Milestone, to record the recipe onto and then keep with you, perhaps clipped to your apron, to play, pause and rewind as you go.

You can adapt a standard measuring jug with seed beads or Tactimark glued on at various levels (100ml, 200ml and so on).

Consider recipes that use cups or spoons as units of measurements. Often, these measuring utensils come in bright colours and in alternating shapes to help identify the different measurements.

Use a dark interior mixing bowl for light ingredients whilst mixing.

To test bakes, talking thermometers are a great indication of internal temperatures. If you prefer to test by touch, you can lightly press the top of an item such as a sponge and if it feels bouncy, you know it’s baked, if it’s bread, and you feel a hard crust, its baked.