Archive for: how-to
Almost every single baking recipe starts with an instruction to preheat your oven. This step sounds so simple, but it is actually the single most difficult step in baking. Unless you have left an ingredient out by mistake or you’re dealing with a recipe that is flawed (i.e. an instruction has been left out), many baking problems are cause by incorrect oven temperature and can be solved by preheating your oven correctly to ensure that it has reached the temperature you need to bake. It sounds obvious, but I can attest to the fact that it is incredibly tempting to put a tray of unbaked cookies into the oven without having to wait for a preheat.
The first step to preheating an oven is to turn it on to the temperature you want it to be. In my old oven, this involved turning a dial. In my newer, more modern oven, this involves hitting a few buttons.
Step two is waiting at least 10 minutes (probably longer) and then checking your oven thermometer to see if the temperature is correct. This step is crucial. Older ovens don’t have indicators that tell you when the oven has reached the desired temperature, so you must rely on a thermometer. Newer ovens often have sound indicators that alert you the oven has been preheated – and they often have nothing to do with the temperature inside of the oven. A thermometer placed in the center of the oven (or close to it) is the only way to be positive that the temperature is correct.
Now you can place your unbaked cakes or cookies inside, but be aware that every time you open the oven door that the temperature will drop slightly. Ideally, you will leave the door closed until the product is almost fully baked to try to maintain that constant temperature.
Very common problems cause by an oven temperature that is too low include pie fillings that won’t set and crusts that are soggy, cookies that spread too much and cakes that sink in the center or never fully rise. Common high temperature oven problems include cracked cakes and cheesecakes and, of course, burned cookie bottoms and pie crusts.
In addition to standard round and square cake pans, the shelves of cooking stores are lined with plenty of shaped pans. These pans come in designs from sandcastles and cartoon characters to miniature wedding cakes, giving you the option of baking a cake that features an elaborate design without trying to carve an intricate pattern into a cake yourself. Most of these specialty shaped pans come with recipes right on their packaging, but to make them worth the purchase price you’ll want to know that you can use them again – and that means that you should be able to bake more than just one recipe in them.
Shaped pans come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and it often turns out that no two are going to be exactly alike when it comes to baking times and the amount of batter that they hold. The easiest thing to do is start out with the recipe on the package and tweak it for different flavors, since you know the volume is just right for the pan. Beyond that, there are two main options: you can either measure the volume of the pan and convert existing recipes to match it (8×8-in pan = 6 cups, 9×9-in pan = 10 cups, 10-in bundt = 12 cups) or you can make a full batch of batter for another recipe and just pour as much into the pan as you need. Conversions can be convenient when two pans hold the same volume of cake batter, but I don’t like to scale recipes to strange proportions when I don’t have to. In those instances, I’ll pour batter about 3/4 of the way up the sides of the specialty pan (both for small cakes and larger ones) and bake off any remaining batter in a small muffin pan for a few cupcakes. It streamlines the process and leaves me with a few bonus cupcakes!
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Many recipes for apple pie and apple cobbler will call for tossing your sliced apples in a little bit of lemon juice before putting them into your dish. Lemon juice prevents oxidation of the apples, which means that it stops the slices from turning brown by providing a barrier between the apple’s flesh and the air. Lemon juice definitely works when it comes to preventing the browning of fruit, but a better question is do you really need to use it when baking an apple pie?
This is a good question because I know more than one person who has rushed around looking for a lemon, fearful of browning the apples that will go into their pie because it might make them “look funny.” The short answer is no, you do not need to add any lemon juice to an apple pie or many other baked apple desserts.
In the case of that pie, you are going to toss your apples in brown sugar, cinnamon and other spices and put them in the oven to cook for at least an hour or so. Not only are many of the pie’s filling components brown to begin with, but you want your apples to turn tender and golden as they bake – not to remain pale and appear to be uncooked. Of course, the apples will cook regardless of whether lemon juice has been added, but giving them a very slight head start on browning by exposing them to air for a few minutes can actually make for a more attractive pie filling. This is a tip that has been given to me many times by chefs (mostly by chefs who also teach) and it is definitely true when you compare a browner, richer-looking pie filling to a very pale one. There is no need to add lemon juice to prevent discoloration when baking with apples. It won’t hurt the filling to have the lemon juice in there, but tossing the apples in juice isn’t necessarily benefiting the dessert, either.
Preventing discoloration is probably the most common reason to toss apples in lemon juice, but one other reason that lemon juice is added to a pie filling is to add some extra tartness to a batch of not-too-tart apples for those who don’t like their pie to be too sweet. I’ve found that adding a tablespoon or two of lemon juice does not do much to increase the tartness of apples when you have 2-3 lbs of apples going into a pie. Again, it can’t hurt the filling, but a better solution is to really try to find apples that suit your tastes (such as tart Granny Smiths) for better results.
Paper muffin cups are a standard tool that just about every baker will keep on hand in their kitchen. Perfect for muffins or cupcakes, the eliminate the need to grease a pan and ensure that your baked goods won’t have anything to stick to when it comes time to take them out of the pan. Muffin cups also make baked goods much more portable and easy to handle (without getting crumbs all over your fingers!). In kitchen stores, you’ll often see a selection of paper baking molds in a wide variety of shapes and sizes in addition to the standard muffin cups. Loaf pans, bundt pans and round cake pans are just a few of the shapes that these paper pans come in. These pans are designed to do the exact same thing that paper muffin cups are: eliminate the need to grease a large pan and make the baked goods easier to transport.
Paper baking pans are great for baking gifts for friends and family, the holidays or simply as hostess gifts for dinner parties. You can use them just like metal baking pans, and as long as you pick out the same size as a standard pan, you won’t need to alter the recipe to use them. You will, however, need to place the paper pans on a baking sheet to give them some support when they’re full of batter. The baking molds are similar to parchment paper and will not burn in the oven unless exposed to very high temperatures (most are perfectly safe up to about 400F), so there good for just about any baking application.
With just a few exceptions, most baking recipes call for butter to be softened or at room temperature. Softened butter spreads easily onto bread and toast, and it whips up into a fluffy mixture with sugar that helps produce a fine, tender crumb in baked goods. Chilled butter is too hard to cream into sugar easily and melted butter simply begins to dissolve the sugar, and does not create the light mixture produced by creaming.
The best way to soften butter is by leaving it out on the counter for an hour or so before you will need to use it. The exact time will vary depending on the temperature in your kitchen and in hot weather your butter will soften much more quickly than in cold! Softened butter should yield easily to a gentle squeeze of the wrapper and it should have an easy-to-spread consistency, so that a butter knife can easily cut through it and scoop some up. The butter should not be so soft that it cannot hold its shape or that it has begun to melt. If it is very hot, keep a close eye on softening butter so that it does not over-soften and pop it back into the fridge before it gets to that point if you’re not ready to use it.
If you need to soften your butter quickly, it is not a good idea to pop it in the microwave for a few seconds. This can melt the butter and, while it will probably not have a big impact in a batch of chocolate chip cookies, it actually can impact the fluffiness of the crumb in a cake recipe. The best thing to do is to chop the butter up into small pieces, as they will soften faster than a whole block of butter. You can put the pieces into a mixing bowl and beat it (starting on low speed) with a mixer or the paddle attachment of a stand mixer to encourage it to soften. A few minutes of mixing along with 10-15 minutes of sitting out in small pieces should soften the butter enough to use in a recipe.
