Do you ever feel like your kitchen is overcrowded and messy? Read more to learn How To Organize a Kitchen and to get some super helpful tips!
This is just a small portion of my kitchen tools, decorating supplies, and fun food making stuff.
To say I have a lot is really an understatement.
So, when Toni from Make, Bake, Celebrate and Betsy from Java Cupcake asked me to join in on The Great Baking Closet Clean Out Giveaway, I couldn’t say “no.”Seven fun food bloggers have cleaned out their closets, will show how they organized all their kitchen gadgets and decorating supplies, and are giving away some excess supplies on their blogs.
As a group we are hosting a Grand Prize Giveaway and one lucky winner gets $250 in gift cards.
I’m giving away a Mystery Box Filled with Kitchen Stuff too.
I don’t have before and after pictures to show you as I have always kept my supplies really well organized. For those of you who don’t know my story, I’ve owned two retail confectionery stores. My first was quite successful and I was able to sell it when I decided to relocate from Kentucky to Ohio. I opened my second store, Candy Garen, in my hometown of Centerville and was happily running my business when I got sick.
After six painful months, through three major holidays, struggling to get through the day, I decided it was too much, and promoted one of my employees to manage the store so I could take some time off. The first weekend I left her alone, she didn’t even show up and I never saw her again.
In that moment I made the tough decision to close the shop, but didn’t want to give up my business so I moved it home. At the time we lived in a small house and working from our tiny kitchen was tough.
When my health returned, we moved into a new house and I transformed the morning room, right off the main kitchen, into my Candy Garden Room. I love my space.
I work at three stainless steel tables when making my chocolate. I have space for two chocolate tempering machines that each hold 50 pounds of melted chocolate, as well as, ingredients and supplies.
There’s even enough space for a full-size refrigerator and my rack of baking pans.
At the holidays all of those pans can be filled with chocolate bark or popcorn in one day.
I store most of my ingredients in Rubbermaid and Tupperware containers. I need tight fitting containers to keep everything fresh and I love that these stack so nicely.
My stainless steel tables have one shelf so I used a few pieces of shelving from a garden greenhouse that I was no longer using to create another shelf to make my ingredients more accessible.
These tables are pretty deep. Behind the tubs pictured above are 50-pound cases of dark, milk and white chocolate.A few years ago, when I was selling a lot of chocolates to companies to use as holiday gifts, I would have as much as 700 pounds of chocolate in my house at one time. Crazy, I know!
When I started blogging, I began using a lot more tools like small cutters, clay extruders, alphabet stamps and more and found shallow drawers were great for storing the small pieces.
Fortunately, my kitchen is huge. It was the main priority when we built this house.
I have so many drawers and cupboards and they are packed full.I love seeing my clean kitchen. Believe me, it hardly ever never looks like this.
You may be laughing at all those measuring cups and spoons, but I hate to clean dishes while I’m working. My dishwasher is my best friend. So while I’m on a crazy baking spree, this drawer can be half empty.
I use kitchen drawer organizers to keep everything in its place.
Have you ever seen so many scoops? I love having a variety of sizes and use them all.
This drawer is organized with those plastic shoe boxes. They are an inexpensive storage solution.
My kitchen gadget drawer has lots of plastic organizing trays.
I know exactly where everything is in this drawer including some of my favorite kitchen tools.
When people come into my kitchen for the first time, they are amazed by the number of spatulas I own.
See them all on top of shelf? I counted 17 metal spatulas and 22 rubber spatulas. There are days when every single one is coated in chocolate and in my sink.
This cupboard used to be nicely organized, with plenty of wiggle room. Since I began blogging, I have purchased lots of baking pans and silicone molds.
What you can’t see is that all of this stuff is two deep, so double the number of molds and pans you are seeing. Thankfully most things stack nicely.
This isn’t even all of my pans. I have two drawers and a lazy Susan cupboard full of them too.
In addition to storage in my main kitchen and candy kitchen, I have two large cabinets in my laundry room filled with more Rubbermaid containers and boxes.
Everything has its place. If it didn’t I’d spend my days looking for supplies instead of getting any work done.
I have a storage room in my basement too. The room is the same size as my candy kitchen. It houses my 1000Â + candy molds which are stored in file draws. It’s a great way to organize them.
You’d think that was all the stuff I have but this room is also filled with shipping boxes, tins, baskets, and all sorts of packaging materials.Whew, that is a lot, isn’t it?
Love to bake make candy and any thing else that has to do with food
Most often, I decorate cakes, make sweet treats for friends on birthdays with my collection of candy mold and bake breads and other goodies.
I have three girls who are into all things girly and a 4 year old son, who loves angry birds, minions and just informed me as he was
helping me make bread that he wants a doggie cake for his next birthday. My husband is in the Air Force. We will be soon moving back to Ohio. I am looking forward to that. I love to look at your beautiful creations.
I assume you'll be relocating to Wright Patt in Dayton. You'll be close to me!
I love to bake – mostly cakes. I used to make candy a lot, but gave all my molds away too a long time ago
Wow, I wish I could design a kitchen of my dreams as you have. We go all out at Halloween and do Tiki Luau's every Memorial weekend too!! Half my attic is filled with Halloween decorations and my Luau decorations are growing too. I enjoy looking through all your Halloween creations every year. This year I will be hosting a Frightening Feast with every kind of creepy looking food, candy and cake I can think of. And Memorial weekend is just around the corner, and am making beach themed foods for the Luau and making Tiki pole cookies and candies. Thanks for the inspiration.
Wow! I loved the peek into your candy kitchen! I've been following you for awhile but didn't know that you owned shops in the past. It shouldn't surprise me though, as your work is absolutely incredible. I decorate cakes occasionally, usually for my son's birthday party (past themes include Legos, Monster's Inc, mazes, Angry Birds, etc) and maybe one or two other times a year. I have made candies, cookies, etc. semi-regularly in the past, but nothing as spectacular as yours. I do love it though!
I LOVE to cookies, any day, all day, any kind! And I love to make cupcakes for Bridal showers, birthdays & especially Halloween! THANK YOU!
I have become the designated cookie maker in my family. Christmas is my favorite – I make so many cookies. Sugar cookies are my favorite though. I love all the different cookie cutters and decorating them with fancy frosting. At this point, if there is a party, people expect cookies 🙂 . I've made them for xmas, baby showers, wedding gifts. I love em 🙂
I love making dessert tables for my friends. In sep i will make one for my best friends wedding. It will be lovely in green and yellow. It will contain a cake, cupcaces, mousse cake, macaroons, cakes and chocolate pralines. I will have som much fun making it!
I love to bake anything, specially in my kids birthdays. I'll do cake, cookies, cupcakes, macarons and savory baking. But our favorite desset is Pionono filled with Dulce de Leche. My oldest son play soccer and plays the clarinet.
holy kitchen cow Beth! it's like my dream world come true! i'll take one of everything please with the organization that comes with it. LOL one of the projects i have in the near future is to organize my garage overflowing with pans-but dag gone i can't help myself-i am addicted to pans and not to mention molds. yes i have a serious mold addiction and eyeballs too. (uh oh that sounds kinda gross, mold and eyeballs-LOL!!!) thanks for the awesome giveaway! :>D
Why of course I want more STUFF! I love looking through your cupboards and seeing how you have everything organized. And I can't wait to show my family, I'm not the only one in the world who loves STUFF! 🙂
I'd love to use your chocolate molds as I know you have hundreds!
I love all things sweet!! I usually bake all birthday cakes for my family and the hardest but best one to date was my daughter's Shamu cake. I hand cut all the pieces to be shaped like one and he turned out adorable! I also made my son a candy lightsaber with glow stick under years ago. Comics and all things girly rule the house nowdays!
I like baking all different sorts of things, but I'm excited to make my grandma a cake for her 82nd birthday in July. She loves flowers and birds, so that is going to be my theme.
I like to make cupcakes and small cakes. I find that I make sweets mostly for birthdays… kid's birthdays and coworkers birthdays.
I like to create things that are easy. I'm not big on exact measurements – but my girls love to decorate anything that comes out of the oven 🙂
I love making candy, chocolates, cookies and cakes. And pies. And sweet breads. And we create for any old reason. My girls love girlie sparkly princessy things…so we tend to decorate with them in mind
I love making cupcakes and cookies and experimenting with different recipes and making up my own. I love baking for Easter the most! 🙂
WOW! I am extremely jealous of the amount of space you have! Seriously! I have to use my coat closet as storage. HAHA 🙂 I love the idea of filing cabinets to store your flat candy molds. SMART! I really enjoyed reading about your kitchen space!! Thanks so much for participating!
Thanks for including me, Betsy! I took these pictures back in February, after I cleaned up following Valentine's Day and had planned to do a post to giveaway some of my stuff, but hadn't found time, so this was a perfect opportunity for me.
Looks like dream kitchen to me 🙂
I bake any time we want something sweet. It doesn't have to be a special occasion. But I'll definitely be baking a pound cake when my husband comes home for his short vacation from work.