Art of baking cakes

Baking doesn’t have to be such a scary undertaking if you know what mistakes NOT to make, writes Aiman Ahmad Anuar

BAKING a cake for the first time can be a very daunting experience for most people, with the fear of failure simply paralysing. But baking doesn’t need to be an unnerving experience. If you know what kind of mistakes NOT to make, the chances of you failing at your first attempt will be minimised.

Now, you might be thinking that it’s impossible to predict what kind of mistake you might commit, but after spending some time online and sifting through the comments section of cake recipes, I realise that there’s a pattern in terms of the kind of mistakes that people are making when it comes to baking a cake for the first time. Here’s a compilation of the more common ones and my tips on how you can avoid them.

SUBSTITUTING OR ADDING INGREDIENTS

No newly-minted baker should ever attempt to substitute or add ingredients to a recipe. It takes years of experience to be able to adjust a cake recipe, so doing it on your first try is definitely a bad idea. For example, the biggest mistake people make is substituting baking powder for baking soda or vice versa. Or using butter instead of oil. No two ingredients are alike and they can affect your batter or final product quite drastically when they’re replaced. Also, don’t even try doing things like adding nuts or raisins to the batter. It might seem innocent enough, but they could add moisture or dry your batter out.

NOT MEASURING INGREDIENTS

If anyone has told you that baking a cake is anything like cooking stir-fry, then you’ve been grossly misinformed. Baking is about balancing the chemical aspects of very specific ingredients to create a final product. It’s closer to a science experiment than just creating your average savoury dish. So when a recipe tells you to measure using weight, cups or spoons, make sure you follow this to a tee.

However, if you don’t have a weighing scale and only have measuring cups, you can use online “conversion tables”. These tables teach you how to convert cup measurements to weight measurements, and

YOUR CHEMICAL RAISING AGENTS ARE EXPIRED

If you’re not an avid baker, chances are you’ve been keeping some chemical raising agents, like baking soda or baking powder, at the back of your pantry for a long time. They don’t work very well if they’re too “old” and most people don’t actually know this. In fact, a lot of complaints online are about cakes not raising properly. Chances are it’s because their raising agents are just out of date.

So how can you avoid baking flat cakes? Mix baking powder into hot water and mix baking soda into some vinegar. If they bubble up, this means that they’re okay to be used for your baking.

So now that you know how to avoid some common cake-baking mistakes, you don’t need to be so fearful of trying it out for the first time. Honestly, most cake recipes only seem complicated but the truth is, they’re rather simple to do. Just follow the steps and ingredients to a tee to achieve the desired results. vice versa. But you need to bear in mind that this might affect your final product in ways that cannot be predicted. But if you really have no choice, ensure you stick to only one conversion table. Each one would differ slightly so using one website to measure butter and another one to measure flour will definitely result in disaster.

Another thing people tend to do is use different sets of cup measurements. Like the conversion tables, you need to stick to one set. Manufacturers make them all slightly differently, so sticking to only one set ensures that the proportions of the ingredients will not be too affected.

NOT READING THE ENTIRE RECIPE BEFORE STARTING

When I was looking through the comments section of cake recipes, I noticed a lot of people commented things like “I didn’t realise I had to save some of my milk for the last part of the recipe”, or asked “what do I do if I accidentally mixed my butter and salt together before adding in the dry ingredients?”

Baking a cake requires specific steps and actions. And each recipe must be treated independently. Some cake recipes require you to mix the dry ingredients into the wet. Some require you to beat the butter, sugar and eggs together. You need to read through the entire recipe before starting so you don’t end up having to restart the entire process or waste any of your expensive ingredients.

The most common mistake people make (because they don’t read the entire recipe) is not pre-heating the oven at the right time. Your oven needs to be pre-heated according to the recipe’s instructions. Sometimes you need to pre-heat before you begin, with some recipes requiring you to do it after resting your batter.