Home baking can be an enormously satisfying hobby, turning simple ingredients into wonderful cakes, biscuits, breads and other baked goods.
Yet even with the easiest recipes, the outcome can sometimes be dissatisfactory. Here are a few hint, tips and tricks to avoid typical baking complications.
There are a few elementary Baker’s basics to master. You don’t need to be a master baker to make terrific cakes & baked goods, with care and patience and a little expertise about the basic rules, there is no reason why you should not attain superior results every time.
He first vital skill is to read the recipe meticulously just before you start and try to understand the steps involved. A little added preparation, such as accumulating together all the ingredients and cooking tools 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 cool.
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 finished.
Oven temperature is essential to successful baking. While the temperature settings on most ovens are sort of accurate, it would be prudent to check your oven with a separate oven thermometer obtainable at most kitchenware shops. Do this on a regular basis to ensure consistent results.
Use the correct tin size whenever possible. If a cake recipe requires a 6 inch tin, but you only have an 8 inch tin available, then the resulting cake will be slimmer and take less time to cook, so either you need to increase the measurements of the ingredients, or lessen the cooking time.
Measuring.
A very good set of scales is essential for accurately measuring the ingredients. Baking is more like a science than an art, so using improper or vague measurements will more often than no result in disaster. Get yourself a nice set of scales, measuring jugs and spoons. If these have both imperial and metric measurement marks you will be able to effortlessly 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.
Baking is quite an exact art. Even the experienced bakers who look like they are throwing in ingredients by the mug or hand full understand that the ratio needs to be maintained.
Many problems occur when the oven is too hot or too cold. Having the oven too high will result in the outside layer of the bread or cake becoming dark or burnt before the inside is cooked properly. An extremely hot oven will kill off yeast in bread mixture prior to the loaf rising, resulting in a dense house brick instead of a light fluffy loaf. Having your oven too high will cause cakes to “dome” and burn instead of rising evenly.
On the other end of the scale, if your oven is too low, bread will fail to rise adequately and cakes are likely to remain pale and will most likely sag in the middle.
Tins need to be greased adequately to prevent mixture from sticking & large cakes should be protected by a couple of layers of greaseproof paper to prevent the outer layer from overcooking.
Cakes with a domed top reveal that the mixture may not have been beaten enough or that the oven was too hot or that the cake was placed too high in the oven. It may also be a sign that the mixture wasn’t quite right. Maybe a little dry or too much raising agent.
Cakes with a sunken center show that they weren’t baked long enough or the oven was too low, or that you were a bit too curious and opened the oven door too early in the cooking process.
Cakes with a damp or doughy center are an indication of the mixture being too wet with too much liquid and not enough flour, or that the oven was way too hot.
Bread that is dense or doughy indicates not enough yeast or that the water used wasn’t warm enough to activate the yeast, or was too hot and had killed off the yeast. The bread dough may have been too wet, or the dough was not given enough time to rise or that not enough effort was used in the kneading process. Dense bread may also be a sign of an incorrect oven temperature . Bread that results in needing a Shun Classic 8 inch chefs knife to slice is never a pleasant outcome
If your bread overflows the tin or the top cracks and burns you may have used too much yeast or the dough was allowed to rise for too long.
So all in all, baking can be rewarding process as long as you stick to the basics.
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