Home baking can be an exceptionally rewarding hobby, turning simple ingredients into wonderful cakes, biscuits, breads and other baked goods.
Yet even with the easiest recipes, the results can sometimes be disappointing. Here are a few hint, tips and tricks to avoid commonplace baking difficulties.
There are a few basic Baker’s basics to master. You don’t need to be a master baker to make perfect cakes & baked goods, with proper care and patience and a little experience about the basic rules, there is no valid reason why you should not achieve perfect results every time.
He first crucial skill is to read the recipe carefully prior to you start and try to appreciate the steps involved. A little advanced preparation, such as assembling together all the ingredients and utensils required. Let ingredients such as eggs and butter return to room temperature a good half an hour before to using them, with the exception of pastry recipes where butter needs to remain chilly.
Preparation.
For cakes, preheat your oven to the temperature called for in the recipe prior to starting work on the ingredients. When making bread however, you will not need to preheat the oven until the first rise of the dough is completed.
Oven temperature is essential to successful baking. While the temperature settings on most ovens are reasonably accurate, it would be sensible to check your oven with a separate oven thermometer available at most kitchenware shops. Do this on a regular basis to ensure consistent results.
Use the correct tin size when ever possible. If a cake recipe calls for a 6 inch tin, but you only have an 8 inch tin available, then the resulting cake will be thinner and take less time to cook, so either you need to add to the measurements of the ingredients, or cut back the cooking time.
Measuring.
A decent set of scales is essential for accurately measuring the ingredients. Baking is more like a science than an art, so using incorrect or vague measurements will more often than no result in disaster. Get yourself a quality set of scales, measuring jugs and spoons. If these have both imperial and metric measurement marks you will be able to easily adhere to recipe measurements from anywhere in the world, otherwise you’ll need a conversion table to work out pounds vs grams or pints vs liters every time you use a new recipe.
What can go wrong.