This Top Ingredient Substitutions for Baking article was posted several years ago. Due to the present circumstances, I updated it and thought it would be helpful if you find you are missing a key ingredient. Hopefully, you will find it on this list. Continue reading
Tag Archives: baking information
Baking Information to Keep You Company
This is a hard time for many of us. A naturally gregarious people have been sequestered and cut off from each other. It’s hard. But it needn’t be depressing.
Almost everyone I know seems to be cleaning in these early days. I’m not sure what that says about my friends but be that as it may, it’s not a bad idea. I’m doing some of that too. I have two pieces of furniture I have been trying to treat with Liquid Gold forever and this just might be my chance. Continue reading
How to be a Better Baker
Becoming a better baker depends upon understanding the ingredients that go into baking. On my blog, I have a Baking Information tab on the navigation bar that has loads of information to help you become that better baker.
Each of these posts goes into in-depth discussions of its particular topic to help you understand their importance.
There are many more topics in the Baking Information section and I will be featuring some of them in later blogs. In the meantime, I hope some of these will interest you and help you become that better baker. Continue reading
The Secret of the 9 Inch Cake Pan
The Secret of the 9 Inch Cake Pan is excerpted from “Baking as a Business.” by Helen S. Fletcher. The book is also available on Kindle.
Sometime into my professional baking career, I discovered The Secret of the 9 Inch Cake Pan. When we first started making wedding cakes, it was hit or miss. Since we made everything from scratch and there was no internet, I would simply guess at how much batter to make. Sometimes we were right on, sometimes not enough and sometimes too much. In any case, not a good way of conducting business. I have no idea when or how I came up with this formula but it works and we used it at the bakery for scaling cakes up or down.
This three-tiered cake is a great example of The Secret of the 9 Inch Cake Pan. The middle layer is 9 inches. The top layer is 6″ and the bottom layer is 12″. Calculating the batter needed for the cake was easy using the Secret of the 9 Inch Cake Pan. Three and one-half recipes of the 9″ cake layer would be needed. Continue reading
Ten Ways to Become a Better Baker
Becoming a better baker is a matter of patience and repetition, but there are practices that will help speed the process. Here I have listed some that I hope will help you – even if it is just one thing you may need to work on to become the baker you always wanted to be.
1. Read the recipe from start to finish. Make sure you have all of the ingredients without substituting.
2. The first time you make a new recipe make it exactly as it is written. It’s fine to change raisins to dried cherries or use dark brown sugar instead of light. However, if it calls for buttermilk, don’t substitute regular milk.
3. If you want to change the recipe, change one thing at a time. If you change more than one you will not know which one worked, or didn’t work. Continue reading
