Baking Tips You May Not Have Heard of Before

A few months ago a co-worker brought a homemade cake for her birthday, stating that she didn't want anyone else to feel obligated to make one for her, and that it was an excuse to bake. Even though I'm more of a pie person than a cake person, I found myself cutting sliver after sliver of this moist vanilla cake with a raspberry filling. I asked the birthday girl what the secret was, and she replied that it was a cake mix. Not believing that something so good could come out of a mix, I asked "That's it?" I'm not anti-mix, but my experience is that anything made from scratch is always better than storemade, or mixmade. I was wrong, though...it was from a cake mix, with a special added ingredient: Jello-mix.

Before thoughts of gelatinous cubes falling into white powder could form in my mind, my friend laughed and clarified it was pudding mix. Before adding any sort of liquid to the mix, such as water, milk, eggs, or butter, she added three-fourths of pudding mix (dry powder, not fully made pudding) to the cake powder. "That's what wedding cakes are made of," she informed me. One of her friends is a baker and this is her secret method of creating delicious wedding cakes. My friend went on to tell me that for chocolate cakes, chocolate pudding mix will do as well. The pudding mix adds moisture and softness to the cake, and also adds flavor. Wedding cakes aside, this mixture can also be applied to cupcakes as well.

As for cookies, I discovered one woman's secret to delicious cookies via her husband. While taking a computer course a few years ago, our likeable teacher kept promising his wife's "irrestible" cookies on the final day of class. As promised, he brought in a tin of said cookies, gleefully informing us she baked two batches, one for him and one for us. While we ate these vanilla scented and flavored chocolate chip cookies, he stated that they had a secret ingredient that made them taste better than most cookies. After some queries, he caved and admitted his wife had a substitute for regular milk in her recipe. Rather than regular milk, flavored milk, or half and half, she used melted Haagen Daaz vanilla ice cream. The ice cream added a richness and flavor to the cookies that wouldn't come from milk.

Being lazy, I had to learn a few things the hard way before perfecting my own dark chocolate almond cookie recipe. One thing is that toasting the almonds is a very crucial step that can't be skipped just because I don't "feel like doing it". One benefit is that it releases the flavor of the nuts (also scenting the kitchen in a lovely way), and another is that it makes the almonds more crunchy so that they don't feel waxy or bend as the cookie is being eaten. Something else that I've learned the hard way is that milk chocolate chips don't work as well in cookies as semi-sweet or dark chocolate ones. While this opinion is open to disagreement, one factor working against milk chocolate is its creamy texture and sweetness, which can be overwhelming in an already sweet cookie. The semi-sweet chips have less sugar (hence their name) and won't burn or melt as easily as their milk counterparts.

Last year, when facing the task of making cherry turnovers for my fiance's birthday, I found a recipe that called for cake flour. After searching on the internet, I found that this sort of flour makes for a crumbly, soft texture. It can also be substituted with all purpose flour and cornstarch. Different sites call for different variations on measurements, with Recipe Zaar, Baking Bites, and Gourmet Sleuth giving their versions of cake flour substitutes.^1,2,3 This special flour did make the turnovers crumbly and soft, and therefore, as Wisegeek.com points out, it should be used for cookies, cakes, and other such pastries, but should not be used for "breads and other leavened products, as it is not strong enough".⁴

Back when I lived with my mom and stepdad, one of the thing I liked to make was garlic bread, albeit in a semi-homemade way. I would save the garlic dipping sauce cups that came with Papa John's pizza, and add it to the flour used to make a bread loaf. When shaping it in a loaf, I'd coat the top with olive oil to make the crust crispier, and would cut diagonal slashes on the top with a sharp knife. Sometimes before baking I would spread a bit of butter in the slashes, and would add a bit more when I took the bread out of the oven, sifting a small amount of flour over the top of the loaf for eye appeal. It may be a part of my packrat past, but I don't like throwing out packets of ketchup or cups of sauces, so I try to keep the sauce cups and try to make a recipe from them to keep from being wasteful. When living as a single woman, I would sometimes save the marinara sauce cups that would come with breadsticks and used them to make bagel pizzas or English muffin pizzas.

There are all sorts of shortcuts and interesting substitutes for baking and cooking in general out there, and I hope these tips and ideas can give you something to consider the next time you want to make something special with a secret ingredient. Have fun baking!

SOURCES:

1 - Recipe Zaar - "Cake Flour Substitute" (http://www.recipezaar.com/Cake-Flour-Substitute-87689)

2 - Baking Bites - "Subbing all purpose flour for cake flour" (http://bakingbites.com/2007/05/subbing-all-purpose-flour-for-cake-flour/)

3 - Gourmet Sleuth, Cooking Dictionary - "Cake Flour-Ingredients Substitutions and Equivalents"

(http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/equivalents_substitutions.asp?index=G&tid=591)

4 - WiseGeek.com "What is Cake Flour?" (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-cake-flour.htm)