Tinting buttercream so that it becomes a ‘true’ black colour can be a little difficult but here are a few tricks to make it not only achievable, but also easy:

1. Use a gel colour. Gel colours are more concentrated than liquid colours and therefore you don’t need to use as much to achieve the same intensity of colour – too much added liquid (in the form of food colouring) can make your buttercream curdled in appearance and sloppy in consistency, making it hard to pipe and spread.
2. I have found that American buttercream (the type based on beating butter and icing sugar) takes on a black colour more quickly than a meringue-based buttercream (like a Swiss meringue buttercream) and therefore you don’t have to use as much gel colour to achieve the same colour intensity. So American buttercream, like the one in this recipe, is my pick when wanting a black buttercream.
3. Start with a chocolate buttercream. This will give you a head start with the tinting and will mean you won’t need to use as much gel colour.
4. Tint the buttercream the day before you want to use it. When first tinted your buttercream will likely have a murky dark grey colour but will deepen and intensify on standing.

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In your baking, sugar plays many roles including helping cupcakes and cakes rise to their full potential by raising the coagulation temperature of the eggs in the batter and hence giving the mixture more time to rise and expand before the structure sets.

However, if too much sugar is added (these simple vanilla cupcakes had twice as much as they should have), then not only do they rise to the extreme but the structure takes so long to set (these were baked for 15 minutes longer than a normal batch) that they then collapse dramatically towards the end of baking. The outside was lovely and crunchy, but the inside crumb was still wet, dense and had little volume – certainly not the ideal type of cupcake!

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The key to the classic light-as-air texture of an angel food or chiffon cake is to suspend the baked cake in an inverted tin until it cools completely so that the crumb texture doesn’t compress as it cools. For this you need to do two things:

1. Use a specialty cake tin called an Angel Food Cake tin. Essentially it is a deep ring tin with slightly sloped sides, a loose base and small 'feet' around the top rim that elevates the tin off the bench top when inverted.

2. Don’t grease the tin… Yep this is the one time when you can get away with not greasing or lining your tin – you want the cake to stick to it so that it is suspended when inverted which will prevent it from deflating until the crumb structure is cool and set.

Because the cake does stick to the tin, once cool you will need to carefully release it by running a small palette knife between the cake and the tin. You won’t get a perfect finish, but this will be overlooked as the result will be a beautifully airy crumb texture that can’t be achieved without this technique.

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Before blind baking a pastry case, always prick the base with a fork (about 12 times for a standard size case) to help any trapped steam between the pastry and the tin or dish to escape during baking – this will stop the pastry base bubbling and lifting away from the tin or dish which can take up valuable filling space! read less

Are your hands feeling a little tired and rough due to excessive hand washing?

To make your own food-friendly all-in-one hand conditioner, simply combine butter or olive oil (coconut oil also works well) with a little sugar or fine sea salt to form a paste. The fat acts as the moisturiser to replenish while the sugar or salt exfoliates to remove any dry rough skin. Spend a couple of minutes rubbing a small spoonful of this paste all over your hands, then remove any excess into the bin and rinse with warm water. You’ll be surprised how soft and revitalised your hands will feel!

I either make it up as I need it, spooning a little of each into the palm of my hand before scrubbing, or I make up a small batch and keep it in an airtight container at room temperature in my kitchen so it is ready whenever my hands are feeling like they need a little TLC. You can also blend in a few drops of essential oil like lavender or peppermint if you want.

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There are many things that can affect how crisp a bread crust will turn out, but the most influential of them all is what is known as 'steamy heat'. Steamy heat is created by adding water to a hot oven, which of course turns to steam. Why it is so effective in helping to create a crisp, crackling crust is because the moisture that sits on the surface of bread dough helps the enzymes break down the carbohydrates into sugar, and with the help of intense heat from the oven gives the crust a deep golden colour and crisp texture.

Also, sprinkling water directly onto the surface of the bread dough, if the oven temperature is high enough, will also create small crisp bubbles on the surface (as it has on this loaf) adding to the crunch!

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Have you ever noticed that a chocolate icing (either glace or buttercream) made with cocoa powder sometimes needs a different amount of liquid to reach the same consistency as last time you made it? It seems strange, but there is a very simple explanation…

Different brands of cocoa powder, and even different batches of the same brand, can have a different thickening ability. So, when making your icing, start with a little less liquid than recommended just in case it doesn’t need as much, but also don’t be surprised if it needs a little extra to reach the right consistency (¼ teaspoon is often enough to do the trick).

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Wafer-thin dried pear slices make a gorgeous edible decoration for cakes and desserts (they are also great to add to your muesli) and now is the time to make them while pears are in season.

To oven-dry pear slices, first use a mandolin to slice the pears very thinly—firm ripe beurre bosc and josephine pears work best because of their lower moisture content. Brush the slices lightly, but thoroughly, on both sides with a little fresh lemon juice and then place on a wire rack over an oven tray. Place in an oven preheated to 80°C (or 60°C fan-forced) and leave to dry for 1½-4 hours (the time will depend on the thickness of the slices and the juiciness of your pears), turning every hour or so, until dry and crisp (you can also just dry them until they are still a little pliable). Cool them on the rack and then store in an airtight jar or container at room temperature (or in the fridge if still a little pliable) for up to 2 weeks. If they soften on storing, you can refresh them in an oven preheated to 80°C (60°C fan-forced) for 20-30 minutes or until they regain their original crispness before using.

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Even though rice malt syrup (also known as rice syrup or brown rice syrup) has been the long-time traditional sweetener used in China and Japan, it has found wide popularity more recently becoming the trendy 'healthier' alternative to sugar in baking and sweet treats.

Whilst it is a good vegan substitute for honey and alternative if you are avoiding fructose, unfortunately, when you look at it a little more closely it’s not necessarily the healthier sugar alternative we are led to believe it is.

Rice malt syrup is made, as its name suggests, from brown rice but it is still a sugar. It is essentially a glucose which means it has an extremely high Glycaemic Index (GI) – 98 in fact. To put this into perspective, regular white sugar has a GI of 65. Why this is important when you are looking for 'healthier' alternatives is that the GI is the measure of how quickly a food will your raise blood sugar. A high GI food will cause a rapid spike and then a dramatic fall which will lead to cravings and feeling hungry – essentially what rice malt syrup will do.

So how does it fair when it comes to taste? Rice malt syrup is bland and often has an unpleasant aftertaste. It doesn’t have any of the intrinsic aroma or flavour of other natural syrups such as honey or maple syrup. It is also about half as sweet as honey and therefore more is required to achieve a similar level of sweetness.

You can use it successfully as a substitute for honey, other syrups and granulated sugars keeping in mind the consistency of it and the lack of flavour. However, I would recommend using it only if you are looking for a vegan alternative to honey, or trying to avoid fructose.

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When piping choux pastry into eclairs, using a French star nozzle (as pictured here) will reduce the amount of cracking in the pastry as well as help to retain a neater, more consistent eclair shape as it bakes. If you don't have a French star nozzle, an open star nozzle is the next best option. And if you use a plain round one, use a fork to lightly scrape along the pastry lengths before baking to increase the surface area to help minimise the cracking and to help retain the straight shape.

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When making a soufflé/s, it's a good idea to brush the inside of the dish/es with butter and then coat them with a dry ingredient such as breadcrumbs, sugar or cocoa powder (depending on the flavour of the soufflé). This will help the soufflé 'grip' the side of the dish as it bakes so that it rises not only evenly but also to its greatest possible height (which is exactly what you are after). The chosen ingredient will also form a yummy crust on the outside of your soufflé!

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When baking individual cakes, it’s a great idea to place them all on an oven tray rather than straight onto the oven rack. They will be so much easier to turn around and access during baking, if needed, and removing from the oven once they are done.

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Buttercream naturally has a yellow hue to it and will affect the final colour when tinting. Adding a very small amount of violet gel colour to the buttercream – a swipe of a toothpick dipped into the gel colour is usually enough – before adding the colour you wish to tint it will give a whiter base allowing a truer colour to be achieved.

The buttercream in the bottom right of this pic resulted when adding rose pink to the natural-coloured buttercream above it, while the one in the bottom left with a 'brighter' tone was based on the buttercream above it which had a little violet colour added first.

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When placing your cinnamon scrolls in the tin make sure that all the neat, cut sides are facing downwards and the untidy ends are pointing upwards (unlike as shown here where the untidy ends are hidden underneath and had to be turned upside down before baking!). This way, when turned out of the tin the best side of each scroll will be facing up and on show making for a very handsome loaf!

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When proving a bread dough for the final time once it has been shaped, and just before it is baked, it is important not to prove it for too long as it can have a noticeable effect on not only the texture, but also the size, colour, flavour and aroma of your final bread.

These two rolls were made from the same batch of dough, and were glazed with the same egg wash, but the one on the left was proved for 20 minutes longer than the one on the right.

When a dough has been over-proved the carbon dioxide bubbles produced by the yeast through fermentation within the dough become too large and the gluten structure that hold them become weak. When baked, an over-proved bread dough won’t rise as much (when compared with a dough that have been proved for the correct amount of time) as these large air pockets have already almost exhausted their potential to expand. As these over-expanded air pockets put extra pressure on the weakened gluten structure, they will often cause the dough to collapse giving it a misshaped and ‘wrinkled’ appearance (as you can see in the roll on the left).

As a result the final bread of an over-proved dough will be pale (due to the yeast consuming all of the available starches and sugars in the dough through the fermentation process), have a low-volume (usually about 20 to 40 per cent less than it would have been if proved for the right amount of time) and have a unpleasant yeasty flavour and aroma, similar to stale alcohol (due to the excessive fermentation of the  yeast) – eeekkkk! The texture will also be crumbly, more compressed and heavier than a correctly proved bread.

So how can you tell if a dough has been proved for long enough? A good way to tell if it is ready for the oven is that when you press your finger into the side of the dough it will leave a small indent which springs back slightly. If it springs back more fully it hasn’t been proved for long enough and needs a little longer. If it doesn’t spring back at all, or the dough collapses under the pressure, it has been over proved.

The best way to save an over-proved dough is to knead it together until it reaches its original size, reshape and then reprove, keeping a good eye on it so it doesn’t over-prove again. The flavour will be slightly yeastier than if it hadn’t had this extra proving, but the texture and colour will be similar.

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Syrups are a great way to not only keep your cakes lovely and moist but also to introduce extra flavour. I love infusing herbs in my cake syrups and rosemary, thyme and sage work particularly well.

To make a herb-infused syrup for a regular-sized 20cm cake, combine 60ml (1/4 cup) each of strained lemon or orange juice and water, 110g (1/2 cup) caster sugar, and 4-8 sprigs of the herb of your choice (obviously the more you use the more flavour will be infused). Stir over medium heat until the sugar dissolves completely and then bring to a simmer. Simmer for about 5 minutes or until the syrup reduces by about a half. Remove the herb sprigs and pour the syrup over the hot cake as soon as it is turned out of the tin.

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‘Non-stick baking’ paper is not the same as ‘greaseproof’ paper and it’s good to know the differences so you can choose the best one for the type of baking you are doing.

Non-stick baking paper has a thin silicone coating to prevent your baking sticking to oven trays and cake tins without having to grease with butter or oil. Generally it is heat-resistant up to 220°C (200°C fan-forced). You can still use it at temperatures above this but it will tend to brown around the edges.  It is also great to use two sheets either side of your pastry when rolling out – it does away for the need to use flour to stop it from sticking to the bench top or rolling pin. It can also be used to make paper icing bags and for wrapping food to cook ‘en papillote’. Some recipes refer to it as parchment paper.

Greaseproof paper doesn’t have the silicone coating but is, as it’s name suggests, grease-resistant and can also be used to line trays and tins when baking – BUT you will need to grease it on both sides, otherwise it will stick! Also allow your baking to cool before peeling it away to make it easier to remove and less likely to stick.  It tends to be thinner and therefore more suitable to use when lining a tart case before adding pastry weights when blind baking as it will ‘mould’ into the pastry case more easily. It is usually heat-resistant up to about 200°C (180°C fan-forced).

And then there is ‘waxed’ paper that can’t be used in your oven and therefore is unsuitable to use when baking. As it’s name suggests it has a thin coating of wax which is good for keeping things like sandwiches fresh and wrapping high-fat or moist foods but it is not good when heated….so don’t even try!

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Some recipes, like those for sponge cakes, ask you to whisk the egg and sugar mixture until it forms a ‘ribbon trail’. To check if you have reached this point, stop whisking, lift the whisk out and wave it across the top of the mixture. If it leaves a ribbon trail that lasts for 2-3 seconds before it disappears into the mixture again, then it is ready. If not, just keep whisking until this point is reached. Another way of checking is to slowly draw a figure eight over the surface – if the start of it is still visible by the time you finish it, then the mixture is ready. read less