Organizing Baking Ingredients

Name: Organizing Baking Ingredients

Time: <15 min

Money: $$$

Project Planner: Kristin

Hey, it's Wednesday!  That means it's time for a project!  For the past couple of weeks, I keep running across beautiful, organized, walk-in pantries on Pinterest.  Besides the fact that I don't believe these spaces are real because all of the food matches the color scheme, I don't know ANYONE who has that big of a pantry.  But I'm still envious, so I decided it was time to make my own tiny pantry a bit more organized.  What that really meant was that I had to figure out a better solution for our baking ingredients.  When I was single, baking ingredients meant flour and sugar.  Now that my husband does the cooking, baking ingredients apparently mean almond meal, flaxseed meal, coconut flour, oat flour, xylital, and on and on.  I don't know what to do with any of them, but I do know how to organize, so organize I did!

Last week I realized that the cupboard that we stored the baking ingredients in was just not going to work.  At all.  There wasn't easy access to anything so stuff just got piled in and it constantly looked like a mess.  I pulled everything out (it was originally piled into the bottom shelf in the below picture) and threw in some new stuff.  The cupboard is perfect for our recipes, paper products (in the back), and our pencil/scissors/screwdriver jar.  

Then a week went by so the baking goods ended up in a longer cupboard where it was easier to grab items.  Still not organized though.

I looked around at several stores until I found the below containers at our grocery store.  They are perfect because I can fit two on top of each other, we can easily see when we are running low on an item, and they are cheap!  Each container was less than $4!

I bought the store out (two times) and am waiting for them to replenish their supply again as I still need two more.  I then labeled each container with cute stickers that I found in the dollar section at Target.

The reason I chose to label each container by letter is because I figured that if I went through the effort to make actual labels, we would eventually no longer cook with an ingredient (like Xantha Gum) and then I wouldn't be able to create a matching label again.  So, I decided to label them by letter (not by number because the cute stickers didn't have numbers!).  Then, I poured each ingredient into their corresponding container and put everything back into the cupboard.

This was one of those projects where the end result was exactly how I had hoped it would look in my head.  Of course, I still needed a cheat sheet, so I made the following sign with scrapbook paper.

The sign is now hanging on the inside of the cupboard door.

Holy moly I love it!  It makes so much more sense and I wish that I had done this two years ago!

See you tomorrow!
Kristin