Baking Tips

When discussing baking with friends or family, often someone will ask “how do you do this, or how do you get such a result, my bake didn’t come out like yours”. I do not pretend to know all about baking - far, far from it (after all I am not professionally trained) but I try to provide some pointers. Baking failures do count as experience, and if a bake fails, you know what to do better next time.
So the below section is just for that…pointing you in the right direction.

On the use of butter

Often recipes mention “softened”, "room temperature” or “melted” butter. Don’t confuse them! Softened butter is when your butter is almost melting when you touch it. Room temperature butter, is butter that is still firm - usually room temperature butter is taken out of the fridge at least one hour prior to using it. Melted butter should be easy right? However, make sure it is not only liquid but also lukewarm. Hot melted butter might end up cooking the eggs in your recipe.

Room Temperature…

Room temperature is key! All your ingredients should (more or less) be at the same temperature. This is one of the reasons I never keep eggs in the fridge. Just keep them in a cool area of your kitchen.
Regarding dairy products (milk, yoghurt etc), the same applies. Take them out of the fridge at least 30 minutes before use (make sure to keep them in a cool place not in direct sun).

Read the recipe!

How often have you read a recipe and thought, “easy, I can do this” and you start winging it? OK, first things first! Yes, you can “wing” it if you’re cooking, NOT when you’re baking! Baking is about precision, or you might end up with something totally unexpected…believe me, I know! If not making one of my recipes, I usually read the recipe at least twice before starting. I make sure I have all the ingredients, I measure the ingredients (will discuss about prep further down), then re-read the recipe before starting (and even a few other times while baking). Only way to make sure your baking will turn out to be amazing, right?.

Baking prep…

When reading your recipe, double-check you have all the ingredients first. Measure all your ingredients and have them ready on different containers. Might sound like some silly fancy thing to do, but believe me, you do not wish to be baking and realizing you are out of one ingredient or be running around the kitchen looking for the ingredient and measuring it while your preparation is waiting. Believe me, not the thing to do, more stress than needed. Prepping your ingredients will limit baking errors!

Weigh the ingredients

As I said, unlike cooking, when baking you cannot throw in a little bit of that and a little bit of this. In baking, ingredients have to be precisely weighed in! A gram is a gram - which is why I tend not to like recipes that mention “cups” as measurements. No matter what, a cup can always be more or less filled and will never have the same weight measured.

Keep the oven door closed!

The wrong oven temperature can ruin a bake, but what will surely ruin it, is when you keep opening the oven door to check. When you are opening the door, the temperature drops and your baking may get ruined as a result. I know it’s tempting to keep checking if your cakes or muffins are puffing up or if your cookies are crisp, just avoid doing it as much as possible. Usually, when baking a cake, almost towards the end of the “baking time” I quickly check if the cake is done with a pick (if pick comes out clean, it’s done), but that is really when baking is almost done. No risk your cake won’t finish puffing up this way!