10 top tips to raise your baking game

At Good Food, we spend lots of time talking about the tips we’ve learned, whether they’re from years ago or yesterday. Cooking is a lifelong learning experience; there are recipe books to enjoy, skills videos to watch, bakery items to eat and social media feeds of flaky, custardy joy to (doom) scroll through. The food world is teeming with ideas – good and bad. As a food team, we have about 73 years of experience between us. We’ve done a lot of baking and learned many things, some of which we hope you’ll find useful.

1. Follow the recipe

Unless you are a free-range, ‘I’ll take the result as it comes’ baker, it’s usually best to follow instructions… provided you trust your recipe supplier. Just be sure to measure everything carefully using scales, measuring spoons and measuring jugs.

2. Room temperature ingredients

Should your butter be soft or hard and cold? You can cream the former and grate the latter, but not vice versa. If you’re creaming butter and sugar, soft butter is more effective. Softened butter holds its shape but sinks into an indent if you push a finger against it – any softer won’t create a good bake. Put an upturned hot bowl over butter to soften it more quickly, but don’t use a microwave – you’re likely to end up with a puddle.

Eggs also work differently when cold or at room temperature. Take chilled eggs out of the fridge an hour or so before use so the whites achieve more volume. However, eggs are easier to separate when cold, so chill them before embarking on meringues.

3. Check your expiration dates for things that matter

Baking powder and bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) won’t activate if they are old and lack oomph. That cute old tin on the shelf? Dump the contents and keep the tin.

4. Pastry ratios

The quantities for basic pastry are half fat to flour, so weigh your flour and you’ll need half the amount of fat to make a very easy-to-use pastry. A splash of hydration may be needed to bring it all together — a tablespoon or two of water, milk or beaten egg, which also helps to enrich the pastry. The more you increase the fat in this equation, the ‘shorter’ the pastry will be, meaning it will be harder for you to roll out or to line your tin with.

5. Ditch throwaway baking equipment where you can

Put Silpat or similar silicone mats or rolls of non-stick liner cut to fit your cake tins and baking trays on your Christmas/birthday list, and you’ll not need baking parchment again. If you do need parchment, look for recyclable and compostable brands. Many people like ready-cut parchment liners; if you’re baking lots of cakes at once, you may need them. Likewise, if you bake and freeze cakes with the liners between them, you don’t want to lock your reusable liners in the freezer for months. Wash parchment carefully after you’ve used it; you should be able to get four or five uses out of each liner and they dry well in the residual heat of an oven. But don’t forget they’re in there.

While on the subject of lining, you don’t need to waste butter under a lining when using baking parchment. Technically, you don’t need to butter a non-stick tin unless the lining is damaged.

A selection of mob-cap-like bowl covers that fit over your bowls (and can be oiled if you are proving dough) will help cut out plastic wrap. That shop of usefulness, Lakeland, has a very handy set that are microwave- and mould-proof and can go through the dishwasher. We prefer the looser ones to the silicone stretchy ones that can ping around a bit. At a pinch, you can use shower caps though these aren’t labelled as food-safe.

6 Learn visual clues…

For example: you can check if your dough is ready to be baked by pressing it with a floured finger. If it springs back immediately, it needs longer; if it springs back slowly, it’s ready to go in the oven. Once baked, cakes should start to pull away from the sides of the tin, and a skewer should come out clean of cake mixture (a few residue crumbs are fine) when inserted into the middle.

…Or aural ones

You can listen to cakes to check whether they are cooked – there should be a faint crackling noise emitting from the surface, which is moisture escaping. Too much noise and the cake is underdone; no noise and it’s probably dry. Oops.

7. Liquid measures

Modern-day scales often have a liquid measure function. Unfortunately, different liquids have different densities, and this means the scales are inaccurate unless you’re just measuring water.

8. Ovens and their settings

Read the recipe and pay close attention to the oven temperature, remembering to go for the lower temperature if you only have a fan setting. Fan ovens add 20C and can ruin your bake if you don’t take that into account. Home ovens vary, so use the visual signs in the recipe as well as the timings – don’t hold the timings to gospel.

If cooking in a different country to the one where your recipe was written, it’s useful to know if the ovens are different. American ovens are often bigger and without fan settings; in a UK oven, your bake will cook much quicker.

9. Better batter

The secret to perfect Yorkshires is equal volumes of flour, eggs and milk. Barney Desmazery (our skills editor) has a foolproof recipe based on this ratio. He measured the volume zof a 12 yorkshire pudding tin and then calculated the ingredients to fit. So whether that’s big or little ones, ensure equal volumes for your batter and you’re set.

10. Chocolate

Only use chocolate chips for melting to a liquid if they are labelled for cooking with, or ‘melts’. Other chocolate chips are formulated to not melt as easily, so they retain their shape in muffins and cookies. This is why chunks of chocolate are used for some cookie recipes – the meltiness of chopped bars gives a different effect.

Choose a 60-70 per cent chocolate to cook with – the lower percentage with more fat and sugar in it is better behaved in all weathers. If you’ve ever tried to make a ganache on a hot or very humid day, you might have discovered this the hard way. High percentage chocolate can be dry and grainy when cooked with.

Cocoa plus chocolate gives you a better chocolate flavour – cocoa amps up the taste withut adding more fat.

11. Sugar science for cookies

Brown sugar adds chew, whereas white sugar brings crispness. A combo gives you balance, but a heavier brown sugar ratio (say 70/30) can give you that molasses-rich softness some of us dream about. Then there’s the curveball: icing sugar. Yep, icing sugar in the dough provides a melt-in-the mouth texture. It dissolves quickly into melted butter and gives you a cleaner, less gritty bite.

12. Fresh or dried yeast

Barney (our sourdough expert) says using fresh yeast makes no difference to baking compared to dried/fast active yeast. The latter keeps for longer and is so much easier to use. The equation for converting to dried from fresh is to halve the weight stipulated; if you want to convert dried yeast to wild yeast (starter), use 10 times the weight.

What does make a difference is a slow prove versus cold prove. Barney says that a method that’s only used in artisan baking can be employed in all yeast baking – the longer and colder you leave something to prove, the more flavour it develops. Hot cross buns, cinnamon buns, pizza dough and any bread dough will have lots more depth of flavour if they’re given a minimum of 8 hrs (or up to 48 hrs) cold proving before you bake them.

More baking inspiration

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15 best-ever chocolate cake recipes