BakeTips
Clever and useful tips for your kitchen.

Drying Your Sourdough Starter
There are a number of good reasons why you would preserve your sourdough starter by drying it, including if you can’t (or don’t) want to use and/or feed it for a long period of time; you’d...
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Liquid on a Sourdough Starter
Have you ever noticed a grey-like liquid forming on the top of your sourdough starter but didn't know what it was or if your starter is still OK to use? This liquid (which also often...
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Peaking Cupcakes
Temperature has a big effect on how your cupcakes and cakes will rise during baking. When your oven temperature is too high for the type of batter you are using, your cupcakes or cake will...
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Evenly Sized Biscuits
When rolling biscuit dough into individual portions it is sometimes hard to get them all a similar size, especially if you have to team them up with a ‘partner’ when sandwiching them. There are two...
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Dry Tins in the Oven
The best way to make sure your cake, muffin and tart tins are completely dry before putting them away is to put them back in the oven after washing in hot, soapy water and rinsing...
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Evenly-sized Hot Cross Buns
When making hot cross buns, to help divide the dough evenly, use your scales to first measure the total weight of the dough and then calculate how much dough you need for each bun, weighing...
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Instant Dried Yeast vs Fresh Yeast
There are two main types of commercially available yeast used for making yeasted breads – instant dried yeast and fresh or compressed yeast. Dried yeast is reliable and convenient while I believe that fresh yeast...
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Cool the Liquid Ingredients
Melt-and-mix cakes (those that are simply made by combining heated, melted ingredients with the dry ingredients) are one of the easiest types of cakes to bake, but there is one main thing that you need...
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Using Confectionery Rice Paper
Christmas-time often has us creating gorgeous baked treats and confectionery, like panforte and nougat, as festive gifts. And when making them, confectionery rice paper, also known as edible wafer paper, can become your best friend when...
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True Black Buttercream
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
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Too Much Sugar
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...
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Using an Angel Food Cake Tin
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...
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Prick Your Pastry Base
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...
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Homemade Hand Conditioner
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...
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Creating a Crisp Bread Crust
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...
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Cocoa Powder in Icings
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...
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Oven-dried Pear Slices
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....
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Rice Malt Syrup
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...
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