Baking for Dummies Read online

  There is a little trick we used to do in the bakery when cakes were overdone: We painted them with a simple sugar syrup that remoistens the cake. You can add flavorings to this syrup, if you like, to give your dry cake a bit of a boost. Frost as usual after the cake has had a chance to absorb the syrup.

  Simple Syrup

  This recipe makes enough for a 9-inch layer cake and can be stored in the refrigerator for several weeks.

  1 cup water

  1 cup sugar

  1Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan. Place over medium heat and cook, stirring, until the sugar dissolves and the mixture comes to a boil, about 3 minutes.

  2Remove from the heat and cool the syrup to room temperature.

  3With a pastry brush, paint the syrup all over the top and bottom of the cake to moisten it, allowing the syrup to soak in. Frost as usual.

  Vary It! Add 2 or 3 tablespoons of liquor (rum, brandy, or bourbon) just before using. If you’re using an extract, such as lemon or vanilla, add just 2 teaspoons.

  If your cake still seems hopelessly dry, don’t throw it away. Cut the cake into small squares and split the squares open. Melt 1/2 cup to 1 cup of jam and pour a few tablespoons on top of each serving to moisten it. Then top with whipped cream or ice cream. Call it something fancy like Secret Strawberry Surprise, and no one will be the wiser!

  Cake Stuck in Pan

  The purpose of greasing and flouring baking pans is to alleviate the problem of having your cakes and muffins stick in them after they’ve finished baking. For the most part, cakes, if cooked all the way through, usually leave the pan without a fight. Teflon coatings also make life a bit easier for the cook by providing a nonstick surface, yet the surface will loose its properties after a while, so if you’re ever in doubt, it’s always better to grease the pan, just to be sure. Despite your well-laid plans, there will be times when the cake just refuses to leave the pan. When this happens, you can use a couple little tricks to make cakes turn out of pans easier.

  First, run a butter knife or a long thin blade around the inside edge of the cake pan or muffin tin. This will loosen any cake that may be sticking to the sides. Place the cooling rack on top of the cake and flip the whole thing over. The cake should easily come out of the pan to finish cooling.

  To remove an angel food cake from the pan, run a long, thin blade between the cake and the side of the pan to free it. Also run the knife gently between the cake and the inside tube. Place a plate onto the top of the cake and turn the cake upside down, onto the plate. Gently wiggle or shake the pan to loosen the cake.

  Bundt cakes can be a bit trickier, especially if they’re not well greased (all those nooks and crannies of the pan can make it a bit difficult for the cake to loosen). Here’s a neat trick I learned to remove the Bundt cake from the pan:

  1.Fold a kitchen towel or bathroom towel and wet it with steaming hot water.

  Leave it folded, in the sink.

  2.Remove the Bundt cake from the oven and place it on the hot, wet towel for about 30 seconds.

  3.Turn out the Bundt cake from the pan.

  It will come out cleanly and in one piece.

  When you take a cake out of the oven, set it on a wire cooling rack for a few minutes. If you try to remove the cake from the pan too quickly, the bottom of the cake will have a tendency to stick to the bottom of the pan and split the layer in half.

  Lopsided Cake

  If the lopsidedness is caused by a sloping oven, this is a problem indeed — and a rather difficult problem to overcome. If your oven is free-standing, you can insert little squares of heavy-duty cardboard underneath it to give your oven an even platform. You can see if your oven is uneven by placing a glass baking dish halfway filled with water on your oven rack and checking to see if the waterline is straight. If your oven is severely lopsided, you can also place the cake pans on a baking sheet and prop something ovenproof (like a small stack of nickels) under the pan to offset the tilt. You’ll have to experiment with this to get the level just right.

  Repurposing your baking mess-ups

  When I worked at the bakery, we had to level cakes all the time — mostly carrot and chocolate cakes. Instead of throwing out the domed tops, we saved them (after we finished snacking, that is). Later, we turned the domed tops into crumbs by putting them in the food processor and adding these moist, flavorful crumbs to our cheesecake crumb bottoms or sticky roll filling. This trick is a great way to use up the tops. Also, by leveling out the layers of the cake, we were able to sample what the cake tasted like without having to cut out a slice.

  If your cake comes out of the oven lopsided, a sloping oven is rarely the problem. Your cake may come out of the oven with an irregular domed top (sometimes caused by overbeating the batter or too much batter in the center of the cake and not enough on the sides). This is okay, but if you’re making a layer cake, it could cause your layers to shift and slide. To even out your layers, level your cake top by cutting it with a serrated knife as follows:

  1.Mark the area of the cake you want to cut off.

  You can simply make a few marks on the cake to show what you want to cut away.

  2.Hold the knife parallel to the cake top and slowly, gently cut straight across to level off the cake.

  Be sure you’re making an even cut across the top of the cake and you aren’t cutting down into the layer.

  3.Remove the cake dome.

  You should have a flat, even cake top.

  Flat Cookies

  Baking a test cookie to see how the rest of your batch will turn out is important. If you discover a problem, it’s better to find out by baking just one cookie instead of ruining a whole batch and wasting dough.

  If your cookies are spreading all over the baking tray while they bake in the oven, you can try several tricks to get them back in shape. First, ask yourself if you’re letting the baking sheet cool down between batches of cookies. The baking sheet should be cool enough for you to comfortably touch it before you put any dough on it. If you are letting the baking sheet cool, then try adding a tablespoon or two of flour to the cookie dough and bake another test cookie. You can add up to 6 tablespoons of extra flour, mix it well, and bake another test cookie.

  If your cookies are still spreading out too much, cover the dough and place it in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes (but no more than 2 hours). Then bake another test cookie and see what that does. Keep the dough chilled while your cookies bake. You can also lower the oven temperature by 25 degrees, and see if that keeps your cookies from spreading as much. Also, make sure that you have more than one cookie sheet so that you can have one cooling while the other one bakes.

  Cookies Baking Unevenly

  Sometimes, you bake a batch of cookies and find that the ones on the sides are done, but the ones in the middle aren’t. Or the cookies toward the back of the oven are burned, but the cookies in the front of the oven are nicely done. What a pain! If your cookies are baking unevenly, three common reasons are

  Your oven racks are too close to the heating element.

  Your baking sheets aren’t insulating the cookie dough sufficiently.

  Your oven may have hot spots.

  Check your rack position

  Nothing is more frustrating than removing your cookies from the oven to find they have scorched little bottoms and doughy, raw tops. The first thing to do is check to see whether your oven rack is in the right position. The rack should be in the center of the oven, and not near the bottom or the top of the oven. If the rack is positioned too close to the bottom of the oven, where it’s hotter, the bottoms of the cookies will burn too quickly, without allowing the rest of the cookie to bake.

  Evaluate your baking sheets

  If the rack is in the right position, then your baking pans may be to blame. Darker baking sheets tend to absorb heat more than shiny metal ones do, which will result in cookie bottoms baking faster than cookie tops. Lower your oven temperature by 25 d
egrees and keep your eyes out for a sale on shiny metal baking sheets. They’re a good investment and can save you frustration in the kitchen.

  If you’re already using the shiny metal sheets and you’re still having problems with the cookies baking unevenly, then maybe the cookie sheets you’re using are too thin, allowing too much heat to penetrate and baking the bottom of the cookie too quickly, before the top has finished baking. The easy way to fix this is to place one cookie sheet on top of another and create your own “insulated” cookie sheet. This trick should prevent the bottom of your cookies from burning.

  If your cookies have burned a bit on the bottom, what I usually do is scrape off the burned part and put the cookies in the freezer. Then, when I need a cookie crumb crust, I just take my frozen cookies, process them into crumbs in the food processor, and — voilà! — I have a great cookie crumb crust. You can use just about any flavor of cookie (chocolate chip, gingerbread, peanut butter, oatmeal, sugar) for this great trick.

  Compensate for hot spots

  You may peer into the oven to discover that the cookies on the outside of the baking sheet are finished baking while the cookies toward the center of the sheet are not. Or you may find that half the sheet of cookies is browning, while the other half isn’t. Unless you have a high-tech convection oven (you’d know if you did — they have a fan in the back that blows around the air so every spot of the oven is the same temperature), your oven has hot spots and cool spots. For the most part, these hot and cool spots don’t interfere much with baking. But, from time to time, you may be reminded of your imperfect oven.

  To combat hot spots and produce nice, evenly baked cookies, start by making sure that all your cookies are the same size. Making all your cookies the same size ensures even baking and means that they’ll all require the same amount of time to bake. If you make some of the cookies big and some small, the smaller cookies will burn while the larger cookies will be gooey and raw.

  Bake only one sheet of cookies at a time in the oven. Halfway through baking them (most likely at the 5-minute mark), give the cookie sheet a 180-degree turn in the oven so that the cookies in the back are up front and those on the right are on the left. That way, if your oven has hot spots, each side of the cookie tray will be evenly heated. This goes for sheet pans (brownies and single layer cakes), too.

  And finally, don’t overfill the cookie sheet. Leave about a 1-inch space between each cookie and about 1 1/2 inches around the edge of the pan.

  Burning Piecrust

  Sometimes a recipe calls for a pie filling to go into a partially baked piecrust, or sometimes a filling takes longer to bake than the pie pastry does, and you find the crust of the pie is browning too quickly.

  If this sounds familiar, there is no need for alarm. If you wrap up the edges of the pie in aluminum foil or, if it is a double-crust pie, cover the whole top with aluminum foil, this will slow down the browning of the pastry so the filling can finish baking without burning the pastry itself.

  Lumpy Melted Chocolate

  When you’re melting chocolate, you need to be careful. Even the smallest drop of moisture (from a wet spoon or even the steam from the double boiler) can cause melted chocolate to become lumpy. Don’t panic if this happens. Instead, stir in 1 tablespoon of shortening (not butter or margarine, because they contain water) for every 3 ounces of chocolate. Stir constantly until smooth.

  When melting chocolate in a double boiler, be sure the water level in the bottom pan is about 1 inch away from the bottom of the top pan.

  Chocolate burns easily if you melt it over too high a heat. If you suspect your chocolate is burned, taste it. If it tastes burned, throw it away and start again. That burned taste will be transferred to your baked good.

  Bread Failing to Rise

  Your bread may not be excited about rising for one of several reasons. First, yeast likes to be warm and cozy. If you’ve left the bowl in a cool, drafty place, you’ll make the yeast sluggish, causing it to take a very long time to rise. If the outside temperature is cold on baking day, preheat your oven to the lowest setting (usually 200 degrees) for a few minutes (but no longer than 5 minutes) just to take the chill off of it. If you have a gas stove with a pilot light, that alone should be warm enough. Turn off the oven, place your bowl of dough in the warm oven, covered with a damp kitchen towel, and let it sit in the oven to rise with the door shut. If you still don’t see a change in the dough within an hour, the yeast is probably dead.

  Your yeast may be dead because of several reasons:

  You used water warmer than 110 to 115 degrees. Hot water kills yeast. You only want to use water that is slightly above body temperature, otherwise the heat from the water can kill the yeast.

  You used yeast that is past its expiration date. If you still have the packet of yeast you used, check the expiration date. If it has expired, you know why your bread isn’t rising. The simple solution: Purchase new yeast.

  You proofed rapid-rising yeast. Rapid-rise yeast is a special strain of yeast that has been made to cut down the rising time of breads. If you’ve used this type of yeast and proofed it before mixing into the dough, that initial proofing could have used up all the yeast’s energy, leaving it exhausted and unable to make your dough rise. Next time, skip the proofing step if you want to use rapid-rise yeast. (To find out more about proofing — what it is and how to do it — see the sidebar “Oh yeah? Proof it!” in Chapter 13.)

  Risen Dough Left Unattended

  Your dough has risen to perfection. Suddenly, your friend calls and tells you that her car has broken down and that she needs you to pick her up. What do you do? Punch down the dough, cover it with plastic wrap, and put it in the refrigerator. The dough can stay in the fridge overnight and will be ready for you in the morning. If your friend broke down a few minutes away and you’ll be back home within an hour, you can punch down the dough, re-cover it with the towel, and let it rise again at room temperature. No harm done.

  If the dough is in the loaf pans, has finished rising, and is mere moments from going in the oven to bake and you’re faced with an emergency, you can brush the top of the loaves with butter and pop them into the refrigerator. This will slow down the rising. If the dough rises too much, you can still take them out of the loaf pans, knead the dough for a few minutes, and set them back into the loaf pans to rise again.

  Muffins Like Hockey Pucks

  Muffins toughen and become hard because the batter has been overworked. If this happens, you can’t do much at this point to help, except learn from your mistake. Muffins really don’t need much mixing — just a couple of turns with a wooden spoon and they’re mixed. I suggest that you finish baking the muffins, even if you think you’ve overworked the batter. You can eat the muffins as they are. Or, depending on the flavor of the muffins you made, you can do several things with them:

  If they’re a sweeter variety of muffin, cut them up and make a bread pudding with them. The additional moisture from the eggs, along with the act of baking them, will greatly improve their texture.

  If they’re a savory variety, like corn muffins or bran muffins, cut them into chunks and make homemade croutons out of them. Sauté them in a little butter and add olive oil and seasonings (oregano, basil, onion, garlic) until they’re lightly toasted and brown.

  Chapter 20

  Ten Great Baking Sources

  In This Chapter

  Supplying yourself with everything you need for the kitchen

  Discovering cooking resources that you’ll use constantly

  No doubt the information in this book will motivate you to bake. The sources in this chapter offer not only great baking goods, but also the most essential ingredient of any recipe — inspiration!

  Chef’s Catalog

  3215 Commercial Avenue, Northbrook, IL 60062; 800-338-3232; www.chefscatalog.com

  If you’re looking to purchase or upgrade your kitchen equipment, start with Chef’s. Its prices are better than department store prices,
and it’s a good company to deal with. You can find your choice of stand mixers, quality food processors, and many great baking supplies — including my favorite bakery-style hot mitts (that are extra long to prevent oven burns).

  Epicurious

  www.epicurious.com

  This is a fantastic Web site for cooks of every skill level. Questions are answered, trends are tracked, and volumes of Gourmet and Bon Appétit recipes are cataloged. You’ll be exposed to much more than baking when you visit this site — and you may end up using it so often as a resource that you’ll end up bookmarking it in your Web browser.

  You have access to a wealth of information at Epicurious. For example, when you click on Learn, you discover etiquette guides, expert advice, a food dictionary, technique videos, and references. You can surf more than 13,000 recipes, plus you can shop, learn about foods and beverages, and do much more. It’s a great tool for everyone who cooks!

  King Arthur’s Flour Bakers Catalog

  P.O. Box 876, U.S. Route 5 South, Norwich, VT 05055; 800-827-6836; www.kingarthurflour.com

  King Arthur’s Flour Bakers Catalog is a great catalog for bakers at any level. You can find a large variety of quality flours, dried fruits, quality chocolate, and some baking equipment — all at a reasonable cost. Even if you’re just curious about some specialty products, check out the King Arthur’s Web site (from which you can place an order).