The Joy of Cooking Cupcakes
Guest Post by Ivy of Little Bertha
Although home cooking is a great way to get
nutritious and healthful food into your diet, it's also for fun. Cooking sweet
things, and cooking with chocolate, is so much fun. It's purely
cooking for pleasure. Browsing through sweet cooking blogs and sites and
getting ideas about what to try next is so much fun.
Here are my top tips for baking sweets and
cupcakes, no matter what your taste.
•
Always use free range, large A
grade eggs. Never use cage eggs, they are inferior in quality. To check egg
freshness, put it in a bowl of water. If it sinks, it's fresh. If it floats and
sits on one end, it's not.
•
Buttermilk can be made by
mixing a teaspoon of vinegar or lemon into a cup of room temperature milk.
Buttermilk can also be frozen.
•
Always use unsalted butter when
baking, unless the recipe specifies salted butter. On the other hand, a pinch
of slat is a great thing to add to sweet mixtures. It makes them more
flavoursome and acts as a natural preservative.
•
The darker the chocolate the
better. You don't need milk solids and emulsifiers in your mixture, you just
want the pure cocoa flavour.
•
Always incorporate the dry
ingredients together and sift them before you add them to the wet ingredients. Start and end
with the dry, alternating with the wet.
•
Moderate the amount of sugar
very carefully. Using electrical scales is the best option for accuracy.
•
Cane sugar alternatives include
honey, maple syrup, agave, date paste, yacon, coconut sugar, and molasses.