A guide to flour, yeast, sugar and common baking ingredients. Illustration of caramelizing sugar, beating egg whites, making custard and other baking processes. Find them all in Baker’s Notes.
How to Slice Brownies (and Other Cookie Bars) Neatly
I admit that cutting brownies, especially fudgy brownies, can be tricky. Do it wrong and you can get large chunks stuck on the knife ruining the shape of the …
Loosely Packed and Firmly Packed Brown Sugar: Illustrated
You come across a recipe for a baked goodie, you drool over the photos, you check the recipes and you realize you have every ingredient in your pantry. But how you you measure …
What Does “Blind Baked” Mean?
Baking blind or blind baking means baking the crust without the filling. It’s a technique used for making pies and tarts with uncooked filling or filling that needs to be …
Lower the Heat When Baking with Dark-colored Pans
One of the first lessons in fashion that I learned is that black clothes make you look smaller while white clothes make you look larger. Just a visual illusion, really, but …
How to Make Uniform-sized Cupcakes and Muffins
When baking cupcakes and muffins, there are two reasons why the batter has to be divided equally among the holes in the muffin pan.
First, you want your cupcakes or …
Easy Homemade Vanilla Sugar
You may have come across “vanilla sugar” as an ingredient in some recipes, especially in baking projects. And you may have wondered just what the heck it is.
Well, it …
Choux Pastry (Pâte à Choux)
Pronounced pat-a-shoo, choux pastry (pâte à choux) is a pastry dough made with butter, water, flour, eggs and, for optional flavoring, sugar and salt. It’s the dough used for …
The Difference Between Whipped Cream and Whipping Cream, and How to Whip Whipping Cream
A long time ago, in my other blog, reader Loida Perez asked for a clarification about whipped cream and whipping cream.
Hi Connie, I am just confused. What’s the difference …
Beating Egg Whites: Frothy to Stiff Peaks, Illustrated
When a recipe calls for stiffly beaten egg whites, what does it mean? How can you tell the difference between soft and stiff peaks? Here are illustrations of the different …
How to Caramelize Sugar
Why do we caramelize sugar? For many reasons. Pasty chefs use hardened caramel to create pretty things for decorating. The hot caramel is shaped and swirled before it hardens …
Stages in Making Bread
Bread doesn’t happen by magic. From using the correct ingredients in the right proportions to knowing if gluten has properly formed, well… it takes practice.
From …
Baker’s Yeast
There’s yeast that infects the skin, there’s yeast for brewing (beer, for example) and there’s yeast that’s used for baking.
Image by Thomas Bock from Pixabay
This is …
A Guide to Flour for Baking Bread
There are many kinds of flour and not all of them are made from wheat. Flour is also made from cassava, chickpeas, rice and potato, among others.
Image by congerdesign from …