Have your cake and ... How to avoid baking mistakes and win the holidays
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Sifting: This is often considered one of the more butt-painy kitchen tasks. The flour gets everywhere and the dog looks as if it’s working undercover at a drug cartel. Sifting your dry ingredients is important, though. First, it removes little lumps of things we don’t want lumps of, like hardened sugar or baking soda. Also, sifting aerates the ingredients and helps them to combine evenly, giving you a better final product. If you don’t have a sifter, you can achieve the mixing and aeration simply by whisking. That won’t get rid of any clumps of craziness, but it’ll help distribute the ingredients evenly.
Scaling, aka measuring: Mis-scaling is probably the easiest mistake to make and can result in vastly different outcomes. Adding a tablespoon of baking powder, for example, when the recipe calls for a teaspoon, is not only going to screw up the texture of your cupcakes, it’s going to give them that nasty, chemically flavor that makes them taste like something robots eat. If you really want to get crazy, get yourself a good quality kitchen scale, and only work with recipes that use weight. Weight is a much more accurate representation of reality than volume. That’s why your box of Toasted Krunchy O’s says, “The contents of this box are sold by weight and not by volume. Some settling may have occurred during shipping.” And that’s also why, when you open it up, the box looks only a third full.
Oven temperature: How far can you throw your oven? Coincidentally, that’s about as far as you should trust the accuracy of its thermostat. Get yourself a sturdy oven thermometer, and replace it every year. If you set your oven for 350 and the thermometer reads 325, then you know to crank the heat a little.
Practice: Remember, this stuff is hard. And like everything else, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. The more you make a recipe, the more you’ll understand what’s going on, and you’ll begin to see how it all comes together. And that will give you better and more satisfying results. Dig?
James P. DeWan is a culinary instructor at Kendall College in Chicago.