Sugars for cooking

Molasses

The darkest and strongest tasting of all the brown sugars because of its high molasses content. It’s ideal in dense fruit cakes and Christmas puddings as well as sweet sauces and savoury marinades (especially BBQ marinades).

Caster

Probably the most widely used sugar in baking, caster is especially great for super-light, refined sponges such as genoise, meringues or for cakes that have a low flour content (such as brownies) which rely on eggs and sugar whisked to a mousse to provide the structure. Unrefined golden caster sugar can be substituted like for like in most baking recipes and will give you an extra touch of richness, but if you want the meringues to be pure white then it’s best to stick to white caster.

granulated

The slightly larger crystals of granulated sugar mean it is good for making caramel, and you can substitute it for caster in a sponge but you may be sacrificing some of the lightness.

demerara

This is an unrefined raw cane sugar with large toffee-coloured crystals. Mostly used for texture in cakes, for example in a streusel top for a cake, in a crumble or as a crunchy topping for biscuits. The large crystals mean it retains its shape when cooked. It also adds toffee depth to quick caramel sauces and glazes (such as melting butter, demerara and cream together as in the recipe for brown butter hazelnut cake on page 37).

dark and light muscovado

Both are unrefined sugars with a pronounced caramel flavour and can be used whenever dark or light brown sugar is called for. They are also great for rich desserts, bringing natural toffee flavour to sticky toffee puddings and dark gingerbread.

dark and light soft brown

Both these sugars are commonly used in baking. If the packet doesn’t specify ‘unrefined’ then this will be white sugar with added molasses (dark will have more). There will be a little more moisture in dark sugar but they are essentially interchangeable and the difference will be mostly in flavour (with the dark giving you a deeper, more toffee-like flavour). Good for adding colour and richness to ginger biscuits and flapjacks.