by Originally published on our site cooking4all.com
Most people just use aluminum foil to wrap their baked potatoes in or line their oven pans with. But what if we told you that they could be used for so much more than that?
You wouldn’t believe what the multi-purpose thin and shiny sheet that we know as aluminum foil wrap is secretly capable of! From polishing silverware to protection from your paint jobs, who would’ve thought the silvery wrap had so many beneficial purposes?
Ice Cream, You Scream, We All Scream for a Clean Ice Cream (Cone)
You know what’s one of the saddest things about ice cream? When you wrap your cone with a piece of paper towel or napkin to stay clean from the melty drips, but it somehow gets stuck to it, and then you’re left with bits and pieces of paper caught in between the deliciously lightly-sugared cone.
We’re not sure if it’s from the condensation and temperature changes, or just the material, but there’s nothing like ruining your ice cream when you’re just trying to be efficient.
Have no fear, though! Wrapping some foil around your cone is an efficient way to eat your ice cream while keeping yourself and your kids clean, since it doesn’t stick to the cone like a napkin.
Warming Up Those Wrinkles
There’s something so exciting about putting on a freshly pressed button-down shirt or warm, ironed down dress before going out. But alas, that lovely luxury can be a bit time-consuming and stressful, especially when you’re at a rush to get out for work.
We have just the trick to help you out, though! If you set a sheet of aluminum foil beneath the clothes that you’re ironing, you’ll get it done quicker since the foil will reflect back the heat and help straighten out those wrinkles!
A Special Mix-In for Your Garden
For those of you with a green thumb or a new love for gardening, you’re gonna love this neat trick!
Cutting up little bits of foil and mixing it with your mulch is extremely beneficial to your garden. Why?
Well, first off, the foil will act as a reflector and shoot some of that beautiful sunlight right back at your plants. And secondly, the light will also keep away all sorts of unwanted pests and insects that roam around in the dark, cold mulch.
Foil Up Your Stovetop
We all know that one of the main purposes for aluminum foil is for cooking in the oven. But what if we told you that you can also use it to cook in a pan?
The best part about foil is that it’s such an easy and quick clean up!
From steaming some good ‘ol veggies for a power snack, to cooking spicy jerked chicken wings for game day or making some delicious Spanish paella for your dinner date, cooking with foil on the stovetop is so easy.
Just line the pan with aluminum foil, toss the ingredients in, and wrap it up with the access foil.
Use Foil for Tricky Surfaces for Your Paint Party
As fun as painting can be, it comes with all sorts of obstacles. It’s never fun to walk into a situation with anxieties, and one of the major worries about doing a DIY paint job is making sure you don’t get paint all over the place – especially tricky surfaces like doors.
Sure, you could use up tons of painter’s tape to tape up your doorknob, but then removing it is just as much of a hassle. But it turns out that wrapping your precious shiny doorknobs in tin foil is so much more simple, efficient, and worry-free!
Protecting Your Pie Crust with a Foil Shield
Whether it’s for your summer party or for Thanksgiving, baking pies can be one of the most fun and festive ways to celebrate!
While the ingredients needed are quite basic and minimal, making a pie isn’t necessarily the easiest dessert to whip up. But we’ve got a trick here to help make your pie crust come out perfectly textured.
Especially if you don’t have any baking beads, before you pop your sweet pie into the oven, make sure to line your pie crust with a foil shield. Placing strips of foil on the edges of your pie crust will prevent it from overcooking and burning while the rest of it bakes. How cool!
DIY Tin Foil Cookie Cutters
What makes baking cookies so fun is the fact that you can make all sorts of cool and fun shapes – which definitely comes in handy if you’re in need of a very specific shape and can’t find the cookie cutter for it.
From hearts to stars to unicorns, the world is your oyster with creative cookie cutter shapes!
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- Tear off a piece of tin foil and lay down the longer side horizontally (hamburger, not hot dog style). The longer your strip of foil, the thicker the cookie cutter exterior will be.
- Starting from the right side, fold over the edges between ½-1 inches. Continue to fold over the sheet ½-1 inches, until you have one solid strip of foil. The thick strip of layered foil will hold well just like a metal cookie cutter.
- Shapeshift your strip of foil to your desired shape.
- Repeat the same procedure with a new sheet of foil, until you have the desired amount of cookie cutters.
Two Ways to Soften Brown Sugar
If you’re not quick to seal your bag or jar of brown sugar, then it’s a bit of a nightmare the next time you want to grab a teaspoon of brown sugar for your morning coffee. Right?
Not to worry, though! Just grab a sheet of aluminum foil, place a wad of brown sugar in the middle, wrap it up, and toss it in the oven for a few minutes at a low temperature (no more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit).
Another trick is to line a piece of foil in the jar with your brown sugar, and to place a damp paper towel on top of the foil. The foil will prevent the towel from dripping and making the sugar wet, while the moisture from the paper towel will soften the sugar.
Keeping Your Apps Warm for Your Dinner Party
We all know what aluminum foil is. But how exactly does it work?
The amazingly thin and shiny sheet that we know as foil, is actually created from aluminum. What makes it so fascinating isn’t the fact that it’s so silvery and shiny, though. It’s the fact that it reflects both light and oxygen, while also maintaining temperatures by reflecting thermal energy.
That means if you want to keep your delicious bread rolls warm during your dinner party while you pop some other food in the oven – or while you’re out and about at a picnic – you can just keep it wrapped in foil, to conserve it’s warmth.
Use Aluminum in Your Silverware Polishing Process
Reflecting back heat isn’t the only cool science trick that our good friend Aluminum has up their sleeve. Did you know that you can also use it to polish silverware?
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- Line the bottom of either a plastic container or serving dish with foil. Pick a container that’s big enough for your silverware to lay flat without overlapping.
- Boil 1 liter of water, and carefully pour the hot water into the container in order to submerge the silverware.
- Add 1 tablespoon of baking soda to the container.
- Carefully, place your silverware in the container and wait for the magic to happen.
- Once your silver is polished and shiny, carefully remove it with tongs to cool and dry off.
Keeping Your Steel Wool Pads Alive
From cleaning your baking trays to metal pans, steel wool pads are a great option when it comes to your heavy-duty cleaning needs. But what good is this pro cleaning product, if it’s just going to corrode or rust from getting wet after just one use?
In order to prevent this frustrating mishap from happening, we’ve got just the hack!
All you need to do is wrap your steel wool pad in aluminum foil, and then toss it in the freezer. Who would’ve thought?
Swap Out Your Sponge for Foil
Cooking can be incredibly fun and creative, but the clean-up of stuck scraps of food in your pots and pans afterwards can be a total downer. But get ready to turn your frown upside-down, cause we’ve got an incredibly simple hack to help with that!
Instead of using all of your arm muscles and energy trying to scrub off food with your sponge, just add water into your dish and crinkle up a ball of foil into a palm-sized ball instead! The abrasive surface will help scrub off all those grimy scraps in no time, and you can just recycle the foil once you’re done using it. How perfect!
The only thing to keep in mind is to avoid using this trick with non-stick pans.
Keeping Your Oven’s Floor Spill-Free
Whether it’s a full-sized oven or a toaster over, it’s one of the most convenient and healthiest ways to cook up some delicious meals and snacks. And even though it might be a little easier than using the stovetop, using the oven can still get pretty messy.
A quick clean-up hack is to just cover the bottom rack with aluminum foil. That way, any drips, drops, or spills will just fall right on the foil, instead of the floor of your oven – which can be a huge hassle to clean!
Just make sure to line the bottom rack and not the actual floor of the oven where the heating elements are located.
Utilizing Aluminum Foil’s Heating Powers
We’ve mentioned how one of aluminum’s super powers is reflecting thermal energy. So why should this phenomenon be limited to only cooking?
For those of you who have a radiator, you can actually tape up a long sheet of aluminum foil behind it on the wall in order to conserve the heat! The foil will reflect back the heat into your room, rather than get absorbed into the walls.
You can also wrap a piece of cardboard with foil and place it behind the radiator if that’s more convenient. What a great hack for those cold, wintery nights!
Just make sure that you’re practicing safe measures with heat hazards and that your radiator isn’t near any curtains or flammable objects.
Parent Hack for Protecting the Mattress
Having a bunch of on-the-go DIY hacks is perfect for parents – especially with little toddlers!
And when it comes to potty-training your adorable kiddos, this is a perfect housekeeping hack when it comes to any wetting-the-bed accidents. If you don’t have a plastic protector to protect your mattress, then you can whip up a makeshift one with aluminum foil.
Reader’s Digest suggests:
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- Layer the top of the mattress with several sheets of aluminum foil.
- On top of the foil, gently place some beach towels.
- Place the mattress pad on top of the beach towels and top it off with the bottom sheet.
Rejuvenating Your Mirrors
Mirrors can really add a lot to the room by reflecting back light, making the size seem larger, and just helps balance out the overall energy flow. But how annoying is it when there’s a few “worn” spots scattered around the surface?
There’s a secret hack to get away with this flaw, though!
If you place a small piece of foil on the backside of the mirror where the glass is, then you’ll be able to “rejuvenate” and hid those worn spots. Just make sure to have the shiny side facing out.
Bringing Back the Sparkle in Your Bling
The same way that aluminum foil can help polish silverware, it can help clean your beautiful bling, too!
The process is a little bit different than the silverware procedure though.
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- Cut a piece of foil that’s small enough to hold the piece of jewelry in place, but big enough to wrap the piece of jewelry.
- Place your jewelry in the center of the piece and fold it over, to secure the piece.
- In a glass of water, mix 2 tablespoons of salt.
- Place the ball of foil with the jewelry inside the glass and leave it in there overnight.
Slippy-Slidey Moving Skills
Heating things up isn’t the only thing that our astonishing aluminum foil friend is capable of. It’s also able to move around furniture! Well, sort of.
We all know that having furniture on wheels is the easiest way to transport and move around, but that’s not always the case. But if you wrap the legs of whatever piece of furniture you want to move with aluminum foil, it’ll make it so much easier to slide around. Just make sure to have the non-shiny side facing the ground, since it’s more slippy-slidey.
Saving Those Battery Powered Devices
Even though we’ve been using battery power-supplied devices for decades, there’s still one universally annoying problem that tends to happen with them. The spring in the battery holder always gets loose! Doesn’t it?
But before you throw out those cute sets of fairy lights because of this issue, we’ve actually got a solution to fix it.
To fill up the gap, just fold over some aluminum foil into a small “pad” and place it between batter and the spring. Easy shmeazy!
Accidentally Dying Your Frames
Changing up your hair style and dying your hair can be super empowering and fun. But those of you with glasses know all too well, that the struggle is real when it comes to accidentally dying your frames along with your gorgeous locks. The whole process sort of puts a damper on all that excitement once you realized that you’ve made a big mess with your specs, but there’s a hack for that!
The same way that you use foil to wrap door knobs when painting, just wrap up your spectacular specs in tin foil to avoid any accidental dye mishaps.
Keeping Your Fireplace Cozy and Clean
Fireplaces are such a beautiful addition to any home, and can really spruce up the atmosphere. But it’s easy to get it dirty with all the ashes and soot from the aftermath of those roaring flames.
In order to keep your fireplace clean, before you light up those logs and embers, you can place some sheets of heavy-duty aluminum foil below the grate.
Since aluminum foil works well with high temperatures, you don’t have to worry about any heat hazards. Just make sure that when you grab the foil to collect it and clean it, all of the ashes are cooled down.
The Perfect Place for Plants
Growing plants is such a beautiful and therapeutic experience.
Regardless of whether you’re an expert gardener with green thumbs or if you’ve just got a couple of cute desk pants around, we’ve got an incredible hack that will really change the greenery game in your life.
Because shimmery shiny sheets of foil reflect light, you can utilize this to help keep your plants with balanced amount of sunlight.
Typically, plants lean towards the direction of the sun. So, if you line a cardboard box with foil on the inside (shiny side up), and place the plants inside the box, then this will create the perfect sun box with even lighting for your plants to grow in.
DIY Plant Incubator
Removing Residue from Your BBQ
There’s nothing like a good ‘ol summertime barbeque. While some people believe that leaving the residue on your grill grates will help with flavor in the future, we have a nifty trick to help you with a quick and easy clean up the next time you want to deep clean it between seasons.
Instead of using all your energy trying to scrub off those grimy bits of food off the grill, you can use a ball of foil.
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- Heat up your grill for a few minutes or wait until you’ve cooked that last piece of meat for the night.
- Place a sheet of aluminum foil on the grates and close the lid.
- Wait a few minutes for the bits of food residue to loosen up.
- Carefully remove the aluminum from the grates, and then scrub them down with a ball of foil using tongs.
Lighting Up the Night
Those lanterns and funky backyard lights that you hang up in the garden are perfect for those summertime nights. But we’ve got a hack that’ll help you take things to the next level with your lighting situation.
Aluminum foil reflects back light, right? So, if you put together a little make-shift reflector with some foil and attach it to the back of the light, you’ll be able to help lighten up the area. This is also a great trick for camping!
Blowing on Foil to Prevent Paint from Drying
As gratifying as it is to work on a DIY project, sometimes we run into situations that we’re not prepared for. For example, if you’re working on a paint project and realize that the top of your paint can is dry. Oh no!
But don’t worry, we have a neat foil trick to help prevent that.
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- Create a “plate” of aluminum, that is the size of the can’s circumference. (You can just trace is by placing it underneath the can and cutting around it.)
- Take your cut out and drop it onto the paint’s surface.
- Inhale deeply, and then blow right into the can on the foil disk. Immediately replace the lid of the can on top of it.
An Inexpensive Solution for an Expensive Hobby
Photography is quite an expensive hobby, and if you’re an aspiring starving artist, then you’ve got to be equipped with all sorts of DIY and make-shift, low budget hacks for those on-the-go jobs.
We’ve talked about how beneficial aluminum foil can be in reflecting light. So why not use it as an actual reflector in photography?
Gently line sheets of aluminum foil on some cardboard or mat board using rubber cement – shiny side out. The best part about this hack is that you can make it any shape or size that you want, too!
Foil Funnel Fun
The best part is the fact that foil is so flexible, you can bend and shape the foil into all sorts of abnormal shapes.
Controlling A Banana’s Ripening Process
Bananas are a favored fruit by many since it goes well with so many things and works as an excellent power snack. And it’s great to be able to buy a batch of them in one go, especially at such a cheap price, but that means that you need to take into consideration the when they’ll go bad.
And sure, you could just hop over to the store daily, but what if we told you there’s a special foil hack instead?
If you wrap the tops of the banana stems with a piece of aluminum foil, this will actually slow down the ripening process, since you cut off contact with air. How cool!
Preventing an Error 404
Especially with the development of social media and streaming, your once super-fast Internet router can run into some slow days here and there. If you ever run into a chill-down-your-spine cringey “Error 404” connectivity issues, you can make a little DIY boost the speed up your Wi-Fi, using cardboard and foil.
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- Take a cardboard box that’s big enough to fit the router, and wrap the interior sides with foil.
- Lay the box on its side, and place the router inside the box, with the back side of the router facing the aluminum foil.
Protecting Your Ride
One of the greatest parts about the development of technology is the advancements of devices, vehicles, and technology itself. However, along with these advancements come risks, like hacking.
But we’ve got just the trick to prevent people from hacking into your car’s signal and driving away with your precious ride.
If you wrap your key fob in tin foil, then there’s a good chance that your signal will be protected from anyone trying to hack it. In fact, some news sources recommend that you can just line a small box with foil and stick your key fob in there for some safe keeping!
