BakeTips
Clever and useful tips for your kitchen.
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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Piping Eclairs
When piping choux pastry into eclairs, using a French star nozzle (as pictured here) will reduce the amount of cracking in the pastry as well as help to retain a neater, more consistent eclair shape...
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Baking Soufflés
When making a soufflé/s, it's a good idea to brush the inside of the dish/es with butter and then coat them with a dry ingredient such as breadcrumbs, sugar or cocoa powder (depending on the...
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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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