BakeTips
Clever and useful tips for your kitchen.
Baking Individual Cakes
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...
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Colouring Buttercream
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...
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Cinnamon Scrolls
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!).
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Over-proved Bread Dough
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.
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Herb-Infused Syrups for Cakes
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.
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Baking Paper vs Greaseproof Paper
‘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.
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A ‘Ribbon Trail’
Some recipes, like those for sponge cakes, ask you to whisk the egg and sugar mixture until it forms a ‘ribbon trail’.
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Rounded Tops
When dipping profiteroles or choux puffs in toffee (when making desserts like a Gateau St Honore) they often end up with flat tops due to being turned toffee-side-down on baking paper for it to set.
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Cover your Icing
When making a glacé or royal icing with pure icing sugar, don’t let it sit around uncovered as it will start to set on the top and add lumps to your icing when you stir it (as this one has!).
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Greasing and Flouring Cake Tins
Some recipes will ask you to grease and dust your tin with flour if you are baking a cake that is a delicate cake that is prone to sticking to the tin (like sponge cakes) or when the tin is one that you can’t line (like a fluted ring tin, or one with an intricate design, such as a Bundt tin).
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Dividing Cake Batter Evenly
When making a multi-layered cake from one quantity of batter its often hard to make sure the layers will be even when just using your intuition to judge how much batter should go into each...
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Stopping Toffee from Crystalising
Toffee is often used to embellish or complement bakes (think praline, spun toffee and toffee shards).
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Weigh your Dough
When making bread dough or biscuit mixtures, an easy way to ensure that your rolls or biscuits are all a similar size, so that they not only look even but will bake in the same amount of time, is to use your scales.
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Separating eggs
One way to separate egg yolks from their whites is to use the halved egg shells. But when your eggs are super fresh (and the yolks are nice and plump) you can separate them by...
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Using tweezers
Tweezers are not your typical baking utensil, but you’ll find them incredibly useful for delicate and intricate decorating work.
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Quick Cooling
Icing cupcakes while they are still warm will lead to an inevitable #bakefail – think sliding icing! It’s important to make sure you give enough time for them to cool completely before icing, but sometimes...
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Flattening slice bases
It is sometimes hard to flatten a biscuit or pastry base of a slice.
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Folding two mixtures together
When folding two mixtures together it’s important to always add the lighter mixture (like whisked egg whites) to the heavier mixture (like a chocolate cake base) rather than the other way around.
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