Being a cook is not the same as being a baker. You can experiment a lot with cooking. If you add more of something you can enhance the flavour, you can add different ingredients and you can take out something. However, that’s not the case with baking. There isn’t a lot of space for mixing and matching in baking. You can’t work with trial and error here and unless you stick with the recipe you’ll have a cake with one problem or the other. Baking is that area of cooking that doesn’t like the artistic freedom to do whatever you want to do. Given below are a few rules that you must follow if you want to be a professional baker.
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- Always use a good recipe: To get good guaranteed results, it is always important that you follow a recipe to the T so that the cake turns out according to your expectations. You must start with a recipe only from a source that you can trust. A lot of recipes that you’ll find in recipe books have been tried and tested a number of times.
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- Use the kind of tin mentioned in the recipe and line it properly. The tin size determines the pound of the cake, which will help if people have to order cakes online from your shop.
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- If you use a different tin than mentioned in the recipe then you’ll need to adjust your cooking time accordingly so that the cake doesn’t come out over or under, but just perfect. Use baking parchment (butter paper) because it’s non-stick. If you use softened butter or oil and then dust it with flour and shake off the rest. If you use too much fat and don’t don’t dust it then you’ll end up frying the sides in fat. If you cook a cake for a longer period of time, for example, a fruit cake, then it’s advisable that you wrap the outside of the tin in brown paper as well to prevent the edges from burning.
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- Preheat the oven: Always preheat the oven is something that is always written in every recipe book and is the first thing taught at baking schools. If you put cake batter into an oven when it’s not hot then it will affect it’s rising. If you want to keep the cake for a longer period of time, then use a conventional oven instead of a fan oven. Fan ovens tend to dry out the cake.
- Make sure your weights are accurate and so are the ingredients. You can’t substitute all purpose flour for plain or add more baking soda to get the mixture to rise. You must use the exact measuring spoons mentioned in the recipe to get the desired consistency. You must also avoid mixing up gm with ml. Both are different and one litre is very different from one kilogram. You can send cakes by post by putting some amount of preservatives in it so that it doesn’t become bad on the way.
All ingredients should be at the right temperature: Most recipes out there call for mixing the butter/oil and eggs at room temperature. Cold eggs can curdle the cake mixture and taking out butter from the fridge and creaming it right away, won’t give you proper texture.
