Tricks for Baking Cakes, Cookies & Pies

A baking trick or two could mean the difference between a beautiful cake and an absolute flop. They’re what make your grandmother’s recipes so unbelievably good and are why a master baker can take a simple recipe and turn it into a masterpiece. 

Creating dishes in the kitchen requires a little bit of chemistry and a decent amount of experimentation. Cooking allows us to be fairly flexible with ingredients, techniques and amounts, but baking is certainly more of a science and, therefore, is a little trickier at times.  

Most recipes are formatted to be pretty easy. If a recipe is a tried-and-true success with a good set of ingredients, then there aren’t too many ways you can mess up the process. However, there are definitely ways you can elevate any baking recipe to a higher level, no matter how simple it is. 

Here are some easy tricks, tips and techniques to take your cake-baking, cookie-making and pie-creating to the next level!

Baking tricks for cakes, cookies & pies

Don’t overmix!

Mixing flour will make it tougher, so if you want to avoid having a rubbery cake, then mix in the flour just until it’s incorporated.

Flour has gluten inside it, which is a type of protein that’s found in wheat. The more you knead, mix or roll the flour, the tougher and more elastic the gluten becomes. This all depends on what you’re baking, though.

If you’re making bread, kneading the gluten is a good thing! However, if you’re making a pie dough, cookies, brownies or cake, then try to mix the flour as little as possible to keep the mixture as light as possible.

Weigh your ingredients

Weighing your ingredients will get you a much better balance of ingredients than you will using measuring cups.

Think about it! Say you measure 1 cup of packed brown sugar and 1 cup of loosely-scooped brown sugar. The packed brown sugar will be much heavier and will contain more sweetness than the other cup, which can surely change the chemistry of the recipe. By measuring your ingredients by weight, you’re following the chefs’ precise combinations of ingredients right to the letter.

Use flour when measuring sticky liquids

If you’ve ever tried measuring honey or molasses with a measuring cup, then you’ve probably had some trouble with most of the liquid sticking to the cup. It’s a pain to measure out these ingredients just to have them stick to the cup, but there are ways around this.

Before you pour the honey, molasses or other sticky liquid into the measuring cup, dust the cup with a bit of flour or oil (just a little bit) until it just coats the sides. This will help the ingredients pour out of the cup easily, and it will make your clean-up easier, too.

Keep egg whites at room temperature

Eggs, butter, yogurt, milk and other dairy ingredients trap air better at room temperature than they do when they’re colder, leading to lighter and fluffier mixtures. It’s also easier to mix room temperature ingredients into a smooth batter, like a creamy frosting, a light meringue and a cookie batter free of chunks. 

Use actual chocolate in chocolate recipes

If you’re trying to decide between a few different chocolate cake recipes, pick the one that has real chocolate in it. A cake with only cocoa powder will never have the smooth, chocolate taste you’re looking for, no matter what you add to it. Always find a way to incorporate some real chocolate into the batter if you can, and you’ll end up with a richer, moister cake.

This also applies to chocolate cookies! If you can supplement cocoa powder with real chocolate, you’ll end up with a better result. 

Make pies a day early

While most recipes recommend serving the dish immediately after preparation, pies are the exception. 

Allow your fruit pie or tart to rest in the fridge for a day before serving it. That way, the layers all set properly and the flavors have a chance to really solidify. Plus, this makes cooking for holidays so much easier because you can work a little bit ahead! 

Chill your cookie dough

Cookies are notorious for spreading in the oven, especially if they have a high fat content. 

Most of the time, cookies don’t need to be baked for very long at all if they’re a simple sugar cookie, chocolate chip cookie or gingerbread. But how do we keep the cookie from bloating into flat, burnt much?

The trick is to keep the dough cool. If there’s a lot of butter in the dough, it will get softer each time you roll, cut out, pick up and handle the dough. It's a good idea to chill your dough after mixing it and after cutting out shapes so that the butter stays cold for as long as possible. It will melt in the oven, of course, but by the time it melts the rest of the cookie will have had a chance to cook. This is how you can keep those perfect cookie-cutter shapes, especially for holiday sugar cookies.

As you can see, none of these baking tips are 100% strictly necessary to make a delicious, edible baked treat! They do, however, allow you to make them much tastier than they could have been otherwise. 

By knowing how to make your cakes fluffier, your pies more set, your cookies more shapely and your cupcakes more moist, you can turn any of your favorite recipes into a tastier version with hardly any effort at all!

Good luck!

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Featured photo courtesy Pixabay/Finn-b