Un-Google-able Baking Tips
For some people, baking can seem really intimidating. With all that talk about baking being an exact science and that takes a lot of expertise, it can be really scary to get started. But baking isn’t as hard as it might sound and it can be really fun! Over the last few years, I’ve been teaching myself to bake, and I’ve come across a few tricks that no one really teaches you. They aren’t hacks, but they’re things I do to make my baking better. These are the most common changes I make to recipes, my best-kept baking secrets:
Don’t go in blind. Read a few different recipes to get an idea of what your process will be. Every project, whether it’s a cake, cookies, creampuffs, or bread, will have its own technique and making sure you grasp the technique before starting to follow any specific recipe will help prevent catastrophic mistakes. If you know what you’re doing then you can adapt to anything. If you can find a video that shows what your project should look like at each stage (not just at the end), that’s even better.
Be warned that some recipes–usually from baking blogs–are made to deceive you. When trying to teach yourself a new technique, stay away from anything that has “easy” in the title. If you followed a recipe to a T and it didn’t work, it probably wasn’t your fault; the person who wrote the recipe has a different kitchen than you do and they may have made the recipe a dozen times before they got that perfect photo of it.
Lay out all of your ingredients and utensils before you get started, especially if you often find yourself forgetting whether or not you added something. I usually put the items I’m using on one side of the counter, and once I’ve added an ingredient I put it on the other side of the counter so I know it’s been added in. Also, when you read your recipe plan in advance, take note of whether the recipe calls for butter that is cold or at room temperature. If it says room temperature, get it out before you do anything else.
If you need to make your butter room temperature super fast because you didn’t get it out early enough (I do this a lot) then take a bowl, fill it with water, and microwave it for about a minute and thirty seconds. Then pour out the water and you’ll hopefully have a very warm bowl. Just put that over your butter and let it sit for five minutes. It will melt a little, but not turn into liquid, and it’ll be at basically room temperature.
Something people hardly ever tell you is that you can add as much flavor as you want: you’re allowed to play with the recipe. With flavored extracts, you don’t need to do this because they’re pretty concentrated, but if you’re making something with fruit or lemon juice as the main flavoring you will almost definitely need more than the recipe says. Always taste your batter before you add more, but usually when you do you’ll find that you can barely taste the flavor. If that’s the case, remember that you’re in control. I tend to find that if a recipe says juice of one lemon I will need two, and if it says a half-cup of strawberry jam, I will need three-quarters of a cup.
In the same vein, recipes tend to be stingy on the salt. This usually goes for cooking, but a good chocolate cake can probably take a healthy-sized pinch or two more of salt than the recipe says. This will enhance the chocolate flavor and will cut down the bitterness of coffee in a mocha cake.
There are no real rules about chocolate chips. Recipes always give a certain amount, but you can take them out or, if you really want to, go nuts. If someone’s judging the number of chocolate chips in your cookies then they’re just biting the hand that feeds them (and really, who does that when the hand is feeding them cookies?!)
Try replacing butter with canola oil. Yes, most chefs will tell you to use butter because the flavor is better. But really, it won’t make enough of a difference and butter is finicky. Samin Nosrat, author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat even says that oil is the key to a moist cake, and wrote her cake recipes to emulate the infamous moisture of box cake mixes by using oil. To substitute oil for butter use 3/4 of a cup of oil for each cup of butter the recipe calls for.
When you can, replace milk in a cake batter with buttermilk. It’ll give you a bit more fluff at no extra cost and without drying out your cake the way that baking soda does. Also, you don’t need to buy buttermilk. For a cup of buttermilk just add a tablespoon of white vinegar to a cup of milk, stir it a bit and let it sit for about five minutes before using it. This even works with almond milk if you’re dairy-free.
Another great way to add some fluff to your cake is to separate the eggs, mix in the yolks when the recipe says to add the eggs, and then whip up the whites and fold them into the batter last. It takes a few extra minutes but it will make your cake lighter.
When a cake recipe says to grease your pan, do a bit of work, it’ll pay off later. Nonstick spray can be great, but your best bet is to put down a piece of parchment paper on the bottom of the pan, cover it with butter, and then take a bit of flour and just shake it around so there is a layer of flour that lightly covers the pan. Your cake will not bake any differently with the flour, but it’ll come out of the pan with absolutely no effort when it’s done.
If you know that you’ll be pressed for time on the day you need a cake to be ready, don’t worry. Bake the cakes the day before, cut them, and wrap them in plastic wrap and leave them overnight. Don’t refrigerate them, just set them on the counter where you were working. The next day you can make the frosting and construct the cake and the cakes will not be stale. In fact, if they’re well wrapped, they will probably be moister than the day before. I do this all the time if I’m bringing a cake to an event.
It’s super easy to make a recipe dairy-free if you need to. Almond milk works just as well as regular milk, and margarine is an easy substitute for butter. Don’t believe me? I’m not vegan, but I make this vegan pancake recipe all the time because it’s just as good and even a bit easier than regular pancakes. Trust me, it’s worth a try.
I hope you find these tricks as useful as I do. Really, the most important thing when you’re baking isn’t to follow the recipe exactly; it’s to get an idea of what to do and then trust your instincts. Having some fun music in the background never hurt anyone.
