10 Fantastic Cooking Tips
A fruit cake
- Use good-quality ingredients. Using good ingredients will mean your cake tastes better, will be a better colour and seems more high-end... This can mean using butter instead of margarine, or caster instead of granulated sugar. Margarine makes cakes very yellow- great for vanilla cakes or biscuits, but otherwise not very helpful! Caster sugar makes a mix more smooth, and less gritty.
- Work out what the raising agent is, and try to maximise it. If you need help with that, go to the 'Useless stuff' tab, and choose 'raising agents'. If it's a carbon dioxide cake, try not to let the mixture get too wet. If it's a steam cake, don't rely on just that, add some soda bic if you need to. And finally, an air cake can be made fantastic by whisking eggs and butter-sugar mixtures to beat air into them. But once the flour's in there... don't beat the air out of the mixture!
- Choose a good recipe. Choosing a good recipe is crucial!! Use a reputable source, such as a recipe book, or the GoodFood website. (Or this website!)
- Don't ignore what the recipe says! If you were paying attention to tip 3, you won't choose a recipe that means you need to go wild. Adding a bit of this and a weeny bit of that won't hurt, and experimenting is fantastic, but if the recipe says to sieve your flour- then sieve your flour.
- Try to save on washing up. Ok, that's not strictly baking help, but it does do wonders for your attitude towards cooking! Weigh out stuff in the mixing bowl rather than in their own jugs or bowls, it saves time and equipment.
- Experiment. Experimenting can be done just by tweaking a recipe. Spotting what's wrong with your cake is what we all do, but not many take action, so fix it! A cake is only as good as the person who designed it, so design it better if it went wrong this time. You can also experiment with flavours. There's the usual ones, like orange and chocolate, or ginger and syrup, but break the mould- or should we say- cake tin- with something really weird!
- Know when your cake is cooked. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? There's a simple way to test this... put a skewer or a knife in the middle of the cake, and pull it back out again. If it comes away clean, your cake is done, and will be absolutely delicious!
- Don't be a peeper! If you keep opening and closing the oven door, then your poor cake will sink! The sudden cooling means air in your cake stops expanding, meaning it could collapse. Only open the oven if you're checking to see if it's ready or not, and if you absolutely have to open the oven for other reasons, close it gently.
- Always sift flour. It's likely lots of you already do, but this really does help your cake rise!
- Practise! It seems really obvious, but honestly, practise really does help you to work out your own tips and tricks, what works and what doesn't and so on. And anyway- practise means more cakes, which means more love from the family!