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Why Organize Your Kitchen

Eliminate some of the holiday stress by organizing your kitchen prior to the busy cooking and baking season. Use our tips to help you get well organized before the memory making begins.

This information is part of our series on Holiday Baking and Cooking. Also see:

How To Do Batch Baking For The Holiday Season

How To Freeze & Thaw Baked Goods

How To Make An Organized Holiday Grocery Shopping List

How To Pick the Perfect Recipes For Your Holiday Baking

Deep Clean The Kitchen

You knew there would be cleaning involved, right. Organizing the kitchen begins with a good deep cleaning of the kitchen. You will be spending more time than usual in there and chances are you will notice a few things like crumbs all snuggled up close to the edges of things on the counters.

Use our free printable Kitchen Detail Cleaning Checklist. It includes a list of 12 Things you may not have know you can put in the dishwasher.

Organize The Kitchen

Chances are excellent you already have a good handle on your kitchen organization but chances are also good there is something you have been meaning to reorganize to make the flow better. Do that now. When we moved into our current home a few years ago, I selected what I thought was the right drawer for my oven mitts and dishcloths. As it turned out, it was a terrible location but I finally took the time to fix that problem.

Do you keep a Stand mixer on your kitchen counter? Is it in the wrong place for a good baking work station? Maybe you need to tweak the placement of small appliances on the counters. Put the toaster away to create a little more space. Store away any rarely used small appliances or decorative items.

While we may not want our food processor sitting on the counter for weeks on end, we could possibly make it a little easier to grab by relocating it to a different cabinet storage space. A few well placed pieces of kitchen equipment could brighten your baking day.

Take out a wide mouth Mason jar and fill it with commonly used baking utensils like spatulas for stirring mixes, whisks, wooden stirring spoons and such. Sit it right next to the Mixer on the counter so you can avoid digging through drawers in search of tools.

Sort The Pantry and Spice Rack

In a companion post, How To Make An Organized Holiday Grocery Shopping List, I talk more about how to take stock of your pantry for common ingredients used in baking. We have a free printable Holiday Cooking Planner you can grab linked below.

It is impossible to take stock of the pantry or cupboards without doing a little organizing, isn’t it. I almost always find some thing expired and am shocked that could even happen in such a busy kitchen as mine. Do you feel the same way?

Storing spices is a subject for another time. Some folks use spice racks, others leave them on the counter near the stove and some have those awesome spice storage drawers of my dreams, like this one. Still others, like me keep them in a cabinet near the stove which is not ideal because you always have to move everything in the front because those are never the one’s you want! Get your spices organized and jot down those you need to replace.

Organize Your Kitchen Baking Station

If you have space on the counter near the Stand Mixer, you can organize a Baking Station. As previously suggested, you should have a container which holds commonly used baking utensils.

The point is to have all of your baking tools and equipment as well as common ingredients like sugar and flour within an arms reach. You could use a cart for this purpose or clear one spot on the counter temporarily. A Lazy Susan turntable, like this one will be very helpful in keeping spices and extracts handy.

Tips for Organizing Your Kitchen for holiday baking:

• Begin with a good deep cleaning.
• Organize the kitchen to make tools and equipment for baking handy.
• Sort the pantry and take stock for baking supplies
• Check and restock the spice rack
• Set up and organize a Baking Station on the kitchen counter

Create some Christmas memories with family this holiday season by baking them their favorite sweet treats. Gifts from the kitchen mean homemade goodness.