Drinking Straws

In this week’s Kitchen Helpers Unlimited  I’m featuring my old time favorite..a Drinking Straw, though at home  I hardly ever use it for its original purpose : sipping a drink.

Drinking straws have been around for centuries, first Egyptians used them to sip the beer, yes they did and  it is to be believed that Babylonian royalty  used golden straws for their beer sipping, later on 1888 Marvin Stone patented spiral winding process to manufacture paper drinking straws; actually before paper straws people used natural rye grass straws.

Nowdays drinking straws come in so many designs and shapes, did you know they can be in the shape of a name? Drinking straw is a functional accessory for any drink and even though that is their main purpose they are very useful to have around in the kitchen as well.

 

– drinking straw can be used to suck the air out of the plastic freezer bag with the closure

When I first learned about this, I was very sceptical but after few tries I was happy I tried it. 

It works!

 

One day, a long time ago  I was making Christmas Cookie Ornaments and I needed to make a hole for the ribbon to go through so I can hang them around the house and so I used a drinking straw, not really knowing everybody is using drinking straw to make a hole in the cookie.

 

 

 

You’d be surprised how strong drinking straws are! I learned about it in a really amazing book Professional Cake Decorating  by Toba Garrett, and so I tried it and it works and is so very easy. Simply insert drinking straw into the cake and then  using scissors cut the drinking straw to desired length. In this cake below I used drinking straws for bottom and top tier and for the middle support I used a bamboo stick