Many baking recipes call for lining a pan with parchment paper, but parchment paper isn’t the only thing that you can use to line a pan. Silpats are non-stick baking sheets made of a blend of food-safe silicone and a fiberglass mesh. They’re incredible versatile because nothing sticks to them, they can be used thousands of times and they work at a very wide temperature range. Parchment paper, by contrast, can only be used a limited number of times and may start to smoulder at very high temperatures. To use a Silpat, simply place it on your baking sheet without greasing and place your cookie dough directly on top of the mat, then bake. Because they add a degree of insulation to a pan, using one of these silicone mats often results in more evenly baked cookies and cakes, especially if your oven (or pan) tends to have hot spots in it. Silpats have many fans, but the insulation they add can mean that a familiar recipe may take an extra minute or two bake fully compared to the same recipe made on a parchment-lined sheet pan.
Silpats, and other silicone pan liners, aren’t just for baking cookies. These non-stick sheets have many other kitchen uses. They’re wonderful for rolling out pastry dough, kneading bread dough and working with especially sticky foods, such as hot sugar or candies. The mats clean with water (or a mild soap), so they’re as easy to care for as they are to use, and you’ll definitely find quite a few uses for one if you have one in your kitchen.
Energy efficient compact fluorescent lamps are replacing incandescent light bulbs in the US, the EU, Australia and Canada and may, according to the specific laws of where you live, completely replace them by sometime in 2012. This might not seem like important news for the baking community, but it is if you ever had an Easy Bake Oven. Introduced in 1963, Easy Bake Ovens were playtime staples for generations of kids and let many of us bake our first cakes. The heating element in these toy ovens is a 100 watt incandescent lightbulb, which heats up when in use and is what allows those miniature cakes to cook through. The transition to compact fluorescent – which don’t heat up when they’re in use in the same way that incandescents do – means that all of those classic Easy Bake Ovens are out of a job.
While I certainly don’t use an Easy Bake for my baking these days – although you can still pop over to the toy store and pick one up for a young baker-to-be, if you like – I did have one as a kid and have some nostalgia about these toys. Sure, the mixes didn’t taste very good (that didn’t stop me from eating them!) and didn’t even always bake properly – but they were my own creations made without the assistance of grownups, and that was all that mattered at the time.
Easy Bake Ovens will still be around, made with a new heating element that doesn’t require the use of a lightbulb. But the little ovens won’t be quite the same as they were before, and there will be no going back once the 100 watt bulbs burn out and replacements become more difficult to find. My Easy Bake looked something like the one pictured below. I think I might get a couple of old fashioned lightbulbs and stash them away someplace safe – just in case I want to relive those memories of early baking attempts with a vintage toy oven and some 100 watt heat.
Baking with plums is wonderful, not just because plums are so tasty, but because plums are a beautiful color and make for some of the most incredible looking desserts you’ll come across. The flesh of most plums is a reddish yellow color. Most of the coloring of the fruit comes from the skin, so I tend to leave it on when I bake with them. Leaving the skin on saves a lot of prep time, and the skin is tender and easy to both eat and slice through, so it isn’t unpleasant (as some other peels are) in a finished product – and it sure is lovely to see.
This time around, I used plums in a Plum Clafoutis. A clafoutis is a french dessert that is somewhere between a custard and a cake in consistency, easy to slice through but with an eggy flavor. It is a great backdrop for all kinds of fruit, from strawberries to pears. The batter comes together very quickly and is poured over fresh fruit, then baked. My plums were relatively small, so I halved them and arranged them cut-side-up in my baking dish, resulting in a colorful and dramatic look for the finished dish.
In the oven, the plums become meltingly tender and sweet. They really stand out against the lightly sweet, eggy backdrop of the clafoutis. I added a bit of almond extract to the batter, which complimented the plums very nicely. The color pops even more than the flavor, as the plums manage to replicate the colors of the most amazing sunset you’ll ever see. I like this when it is served at room temperature, but it is also good after being chilled in the refrigerator before serving.
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The only baked good cuter than a cupcake is a mini cupcake, but there aren’t as many recipes out there for these downsized goodies as there are for their full-sized counterparts. Fortunately, it is not difficult to turn a batch of full sized cupcakes into miniature ones as long as you have a mini muffin pan to work with.
Most cupcake recipes can be made into mini cupcakes. Mini cupcake pans hold roughly 1/3 of the amount of regular cupcake pans, so if you have a recipe that yields 12 full sized cupcakes, you’ll get 36 minis from the same amount of batter. It is much easier to start with the full recipe and make a big batch of minis than to cut down the recipe, as there are some recipes that don’t take well to downsizing.
Once you have your batter, fill up the mini muffin pan as you would a regular muffin pan (filling each cup somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 full) and pop the tray in the oven. While most cupcakes take about 15-20 minutes to bake, most mini cupcakes take from 9-14 minutes or so to reach donenss. Check your minis at 9 or 10 minutes with a toothpick and bake longer as needed. The only thing you really need to look out for is the fact that it is easy to overbake these miniature cakes, so keep a close eye on them while they’re baking and check them at very short intervals when they’re close to being done.
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