Vanilla sugar is the most common flavored sugar, and it’s one that you’ve probably made – it’s a great way to use up spent vanilla beans – or sprinkled on top of hot or cold cereal for breakfast. I keep a big container of it in my pantry and use it …
Buttermilk is an ingredient that I always keep in my refrigerator because I use it a lot for baking. It not only adds great flavor to baked goods, but it helps to tenderize cakes, muffins and other treats, too. Although I usually have it in stock, buttermilk is an ingredient …
Pound cake, unlike other cakes, is supposed to crack on top as it bakes. This is primarily because the batter is very dense. The dense batter requires a very looking cooking time to bake all the way through, and the exterior of the cake sets up before the interior does. As the …
Multi-colored cakes can be fun for a lot of reasons. They can help you show team spirit on an important game day, turn plain cupcakes into a great theme dessert or simply hint at the flavor inside a baked good. It is easy to …
When you are making a layer cake, one of the most important steps in decorating it is applying a crumb coat. The crumb coat is a very thin layer of icing that you cover the entire cake with, and the purpose is to contain any crumbs that might have come …
Easter has some of the most colorful candies and decorations of any holiday. Some holidays, like Halloween and Christmas, are deeply connected to specific colors. Easter is a little bit of a free-for-all when it comes to colors, thanks to the fact that it falls in the springtime when flowers are starting to …
Marshmallow Peeps are an Easter staple – or, at least, they were for me. As much as I like chocolate, I was always excited to get a package of Peeps in my Easter basket. They were cute, colorful and light enough to be the perfect contrast to a heavy chocolate egg. I still …
Royal icing is a hard white icing made from egg whites and confectioners’ sugar. It is described as a “hard” icing because it dries hard, unlike buttercream frostings which remain soft even after they have sat out for a long period of time. It is typically made from meringue powder, rather than …
