C for Cake! 5 baking tips

Baking is both an art and science. Baking is different from cooking because it’s more precise and relies on combinations of ingredients to achieve a result. Unlike sauteeing a piece of chicken where you’re working with one ingredient, baking requires juggling several ingredients at once and then applying some catalyst to change the structure of those ingredients into a new dish.

Regardless, here are some tips that will help you in the kitchen. Most of these I’ve learned the hard way.

1. Mise en Place – that’s a fancy chef term for getting all your ingredients together at one time before beginning your dish. gather all your ingredients beforehand and measure everything out in prep bowls before beginning.

2. Weight instead of eyeballs. Oftentimes a recipe will tell you to divide a dough in halves quarters or even smaller parts. You can try eyeballing the divisions but often you’ll find that your parts are different sizes. An easy fix is to simply weigh your dough on the kitchen scale.

3. Separate bowl for eggs. Have you ever try to fish out egg shell that fell into the batter. That’s always a pain. It’s much easier to crack the eggs into a separate bowl first. Then if some shell falls in you aren’t fishing around in a big bowl of batter trying to get it out.

4. Line your baking sheets. Regardless of what you choose, lining your baking sheets will help you tremendously. Cookies and other treats won’t stick and it’ll make clean up much easier. 

5. Read your recipe. Before you begin, read your recipe several times. This is especially true if you are working with a new recipe or technique. Read it over so that you can have a general idea of what steps are involved before you begin.

I hope these help you out!