What is Shortbread?

Shortbread is a traditional Scottish cookie and biscuit that are sweet and rich, ideal for an afternoon tea. Shortbread recipes traditionally contain butter, sugar, and flour, with one part sugar to two parts butter. While most shortbread recipes call for plain white flour, you can find versions that are made with a variety of ingredients to create different flavors and textures. If you’re looking for a recipe with a low fat content, you can find those, too.

In the modern era, cornstarch is often added to shortbread dough. This can simulate the crumbly texture of old-fashioned shortbread without the use of all-purpose flour. Many claim that only one type is authentic, but there are many variations. Listed below are some tips on identifying which type of shortbread is right for you. Purists will probably insist on only one basic recipe, but there are so many excellent ways to bake this cookie that you don’t want to restrict yourself.

Butter Is The Key

When mixing shortbread, the butter should not be at room temperature when the dough is being prepared. Room-temperature butter would melt away as soon as it went into a hot oven. Instead, refrigerating the butter will help it take longer to melt and allow you to make cut-out shortbread cookies. As with most cookies, the ingredients make a huge difference in the flavor and texture of the finished product. Remember, a perfect shortbread cookie will be crumbly, sweet,buttery but not greasy.

You can find a lot of different cookie recipes that will give you some fun options.  Chocolate lovers can add dark chocolate to give a yin and yang taste sensation.  Almond lovers can add almond extract or frost these cookies with almond icing.  There is no limit to the options that you can explore with these versatile cookies.

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Baking a Cake – Why We Love Cakes

As I found, there is more to mastering how to bake a cake than what is composed on the dish card. Now that I knew some of the fundamentals, how to bake a cake was a much simpler job.

Before baking in an oven, I would examine the cake recipe and make sure it called for the best temperature for the cake. When I purchased a brand-new oven I discovered that you have to inspect the accuracy of the oven’s temperature.  There can be a variance of up to 10 degrees on some new ovens.

Find Your Favorite Cake Recipes

I like to try different type of cake recipes, from bundt cakes to angle food cakes. My household isn’t fussy, they tend to eat any cake that I make. Trial and mistake have actually worked well for me although I have actually made a couple of genuinely miserable cakes when I didn’t take note of just how much of each active ingredient I was using. I could hear my mother’s voice informing me to follow the recipe, that’s why you have it!

I have likewise baked numerous cakes utilizing a microwave. Unlike the oven, you can’t control the temperature in the traditional method and cakes do not brown. There are some packaged cake blends that are created for microwave, that is the only method I would bake a cake in a microwave. Your toaster is a different matter. It works actually well for any cake dish and you don’t have to change any settings or change the dish. Many people do not think of a toaster oven as a little cooking area appliance that can bake cakes, but it works really well.

To minimize mess and make baking a breeze, buy a silicone sheet and line the inner side of your pan with it. If you’re going to be baking a cake using a baking sheet pan, spray it with non-stick spray prior to lining the pan. This helps in reducing the amount of grease that will accumulate on the bottom of the pan, making it easier to eliminate burned bits and making it easier to remove the cake from the pan with a spatula.

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Kitchen Mixing Bowls – Making The Right Choice

A great set of dependable mixing bowls are important baking tools. Numerous featured a non-stick surface and are perfect for all type of mixing operations. Stacking bowls help to de-clutter home kitchen area cabinets and have with a stacked design that allows for simple storage.

Stainless-steel kitchen mixing bowls have a non-stick surface area that makes cleanup easy and lowers the danger of dangerous food poisoning. The bowl’s fine-line style likewise avoids scratches, leaving them smooth and unbroken for many years of problem-free use. Stainless steel is a common product used for kitchen bowls and these bowls are great in the majority of cooking and baking circumstances. They are light-weight, don’t scratch easily and last a long period of time. The drawback of stainless steel or aluminum is that they don’t wash well in a dishwasher and they can respond badly with some food active ingredients.

Many excellent quality blending bowl sets come with a collection of lids that enable you to keep your favorite foods and leftovers. Some bowls can also include determining lines, manages, and pour spout. Many chefs choose bowls that are stacking, they use up less area in a cupboard and nest together really perfectly.

Look For Dishwasher Safe Mixing Bowls

You might want to look for dishwasher-safe bowls so you do not have to stress about cleaning and drying any bowls when they get used if you dislike washing dishes by hand. Just tossing the bowl into the dishwasher is the goal of numerous cooks and bakers, it’s difficult to argue with benefit. Glass, stone, and ceramic blending bowls are generally dishwasher friendly.

If you choose something that is both stunning and long lasting then the clear glass mixing bowl would be a terrific option. Typically the bowl has various measurements on the outside so you know precisely how much to use when making a recipe.

Have The Right Kitchen Tools

Great bowls, like a great spatula or an excellent stand mixer, are necessary cooking area tools that every chef and baker need to have on hand. While a bowl might seem standard and unimportant, your baking and cooking life will be a lot simpler if you have the best bowls at the ready when you tackle on of your family’s favorite recipes.

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Hurray For My KitchenAid Mixer!

A KitchenAid mixer can be one of the most important kitchens tools to use when baking your own bread, cookies, and pastries. I like to use my KitchenAid mixer for practically all of my baking tasks.

KitchenAid Mixer – This is the one I utilize the most typically. It is an incredible maker. The attachments, kneading tools, and paddles all work great. When out searching for baking tools, remember what you will be using them for. If you are just making cookies, then get a small mixer. If you are seeming active with your baking you should get a bigger unit.

Lots Of Attachments For This Mixer

These mixers come with various accessories and they are terrific.  There are three basic attachments that you will use; a whisk, a mixing paddle and a kneading hook.  Each serves a separate purpose and each can make your baking life a lot easier.

If you are like me and are a fundamental cook, than these mixers will permit you to bake basic cookie dishes, or produce some of your own recipes. If you are a baking addict, then you will love utilizing these baking tools.

The KitchenAid Artisan mixer is an all-in-one system and is fantastic for baking bread, pies, pan cookies, muffins, and a lot more. You will discover that it does make cookie dough much easier to make. And if you are not a baking freak, you ought to be happy with this baking tools.

Make Sure You Have Other Baking Tools On Hand

You will want to invest in a baking pan or cookie sheet if you are going to start baking pies, cookies, or cakes. And if you are looking for something more specialized, then you might wish to look into buying a combo set of baking pans and the Kitchen Aid paddle. These combination sets will enable you to bake just about anything, consisting of pie and cake tarts, foccacia breads, fruit tarts, and even lasagna!  Keep a good supply of assorted kitchen spoons and spatulas on hand, you can never have too many of those when baking.

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How to Make Cupcakes

A cupcake is a small, rounded cake typically baked in a paper or aluminum cup. It’s often decorated with frosting, fruit or other toppings such as sprinkles or candy. The most important thing to remember when making a cupcake is to not over bake, they can dry out quickly.  Using a non-stick cupcake pan will make the whole process much easier.  Make sure you are using the right bakeware.

The most basic ingredient for baking cupcakes is butter. The butter should be room temperature, but if it gets too soft it can always be refrigerated for a few hours. The eggs should be at room temperature as well. This will help your cupcakes bake more evenly and faster, helping to keep them from becoming too dry.  The oven temperature is also important, make sure that your oven is accurate when it comes to the temp.

Always Follow Your Recipe

If you’re making cupcakes from scratch, you should follow the recipe exactly. When you bake a cupcake, make sure the batter is not too thick. Do not over bake the cakes or they will become dry and crumbly.  The old school way of using a toothpick to check doneness is still the most efficient way to see if your dessert is done.  A clean toothpick means done, if there is batter on the toothpick you need to bake a bit longer.

It’s good to experiment with different flavors and combinations. Most people think that a vanilla or chocolate cupcake only comes from a box or can’t be customized. But this is not true! You add almost any flavor to a cupcake batter and have great results.  Adding a filling is usually done after baking with a syringe or some other tool that allows you to inject the filling from the bottom or side of the cupcake.

If you’re baking cupcakes from scratch, you can use different types of flour, sugar and flavors. You can even experiment with additions to the batter such as candy pieces. Once the batter is mixed, pour it into the muffin cups and bake for the time stated in the recipe. You can then add a bit of frosting for each cupcake, experiment with flavors, and see which ones work best for your palate.

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Basic Bread Baking Tips

Baking bread in the home has ended up being a little of a fashion pattern over the past decade or two. If you have not tried it, then here is what you need to understand. Bread is probably among the earliest staples around the globe. For thousands of years bread was a basic staple food product to lots of various cultures. It is a product that has become part of every person’s diet.

When I was growing up, there was just one location where I could purchase bread: the local bakery. The newly baked breads that my mother and grandma would generate every morning were an astounding reward that I would take with me on trips to school and other locations. This is where I got my first real experience with baking bread.

Learning The Secrets Of  Basic Bread Baking

After I had actually begun my school profession, I chose that I wanted to continue to delight in the advantages of baked breads that my mom and granny baked for me. So for my high school graduation present, I chose that I wished to learn how to make and bake homemade bread in your home. After I got my degree in nutrition, I decided that this would be a fantastic project for me to pursue while working full time.

After I got my degree and began my first full-time job, I continued on with my passion of baking breads and making homemade bread for my family and good friends’ sandwiches. Over the last couple of years I have refined my bread recipe and have actually gotten terrific evaluations from people that have attempted the loaf and enjoyed it.

Should You Use A Bread Machine?

I knew that I was on a roll and might not wait to share my new-found skill with everyone when I began making bread last week. I did not believe much about making bread when I was in college, however after operating in the food service market for several years, I understood the importance of learning how to bake bread and how to use the bread maker. The other night I took a picture of the loaf and published it on my Facebook page along with the message, “Bread Loaf – Your Home Kitchen helper here! Make certain to utilize the bread maker after cutting the loaf to avoid any problems. Delighted Baking!” I got a lot of positive feedback from family and friends members.

If I had just known how to bake bread in a bread maker, I would have taken a lot longer to master the art of bread making. I also discovered that having some actually good bakeware and loaf pans made a distinction in the types of homemade bread that I baked.

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Easy Baking Techniques That You Can Use To Bake Cookies

Baking cookies is enjoyable and a terrific method to get closer to your family. When they are old sufficient to understand how to mix active ingredients, it also serves as a fantastic activity for you to do with the kids. The very first thing that you need to do is to gather the necessary components for the dish. If you wish to follow a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, then you will need the following active ingredients: flour, sugar, butter, vanilla, baking soda, eggs, salt, and chocolate chips. If you wish to make a sugar cookie recipe, then you will require the following components: flour, sugar, milk, eggs, salt, and powdered sugar

Now that you have the components to bake cookies, all you need to do is to combine them and mix them into the dough. It is recommended to utilize a stand mixer, this will help make sure that the dough is actually well mixed. Make certain that your butter and your eggs are at space temperature level and inspect to the expiration date on the sodium bicarbonate and baking powder.

Shape Your Cookies

You will now start to roll it out to form a round or elongate shape when you have made the dough. Some recipes call for dropping the dough onto the pan, these are called drop cookies.  This will put your cookies into the preferred shape. Heat your oven to the temperature level required in the dish and ensure that the oven is at the appropriate temperature level. Do not use lower or greater oven temps unless you really understand what you are doing.

Some cookies doughs, such as chocolate chip cookies, will benefit by spending some time in the fridge, up to one hour prior to you utilize the dough. Quality cookies require quality cookie sheets. Some cookies, like chocolate chip, will brown while others, like sugar cookies, won’t.

Keeping your cookies fresh requires you to ensure that they are well covered and safeguarded from airflow. You can acquire storage containers and use them to save your cookies in. The majority of these containers are already in your cooking area, they can be plastic or glass and can stay in the freezer for longer storage.

There Are Plenty Of Different Types Of Cookies To Bake

Baking meringue cookies requires you to utilize unique components. The primary components that you will be using for these cookies are eggs, butter and sugar. The remainder of the active ingredients that you will be using to make your cookies come together in the kind of a cookie, consist of vanilla extract, brown sugar and powdered sugar.

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How To Choose The Best Bake Ware

Buying bake ware can be a really pleasurable experience for bakers of any ability level, but there are a number of important things that every cook should understand prior to they start making any purchases. First off, you wish to ensure that the pieces that you purchase is both safe and resilient for the oven. There are several kinds of baking pans on the marketplace, so it can be puzzling to choose which pieces or sets will work best for you. Picking which pans and baking sheets will be required, and what they will be made from, are the first actions you will require to take.

Another important product when it comes to choosing the right bake ware is the baking pan, likewise called a cookie sheet. This is a crucial tool to have in your kitchen and one that you ought to acquire according to the type and amount of baking that you plan on doing. They are generally made from steel and have a non-stick surface area for easy cleansing, plus the food will not stick.

Take Notice Of Oven Mitts!

You might not pay much attention to them, but oven mitts are critical pieces of baking equipment. The most typical kind of oven mitts are the heavy, cushioned mitts that do a fantastic task of keeping your hands safe from any burns. You need to be able to move pans and sheets around in hot ovens and you do not desire to be utilizing a towel or some other product to protect your hands. Some mitts are made from newer materials that are not as bulky but still do an excellent job.

Some bakeware sets also feature silicone-coated manages along with non-stick surfaces. However, these types of bakeware do require that you use wooden or silicone spatulas and spoons. Teflon and other non-stick surfaces are surprisingly thin and will tear quickly if you utilize metal utensils. Once torn or scratched, these pieces of bake ware tend to become unusable.

Purchase A Reliable Kitchen Thermometer

Lastly, another item that you will absolutely need to have on hand in your kitchen is a thermometer. If you are baking a recipe that calls for the food to be at a particular temperature, then you will absolutely require to make certain that you are using a thermometer. Some kinds of bake ware, such as cast iron, hold heat longer and that can impact how your food bakes. Utilizing a kitchen thermometer takes the guess work out of your baking.

There are numerous different types of baking pans on the market, so it can be confusing to pick which sets or pieces will work best for you. Choosing which pans and baking sheets is important, and what they will be made of, are the first actions you will need to take.

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Baking a Cake – The Easy Way to Perfect Cake Creation

Ah, the elusive art of how to bake a cake, and all of its delicious secrets. When I found the perfect cake recipe, it was such a welcome surprise! But as I discovered, there is more to mastering baking a cake than what is written on the recipe card. So now that I knew some of the basics, how to bake a cake was a much easier task.

Before baking in an oven, I would inspect the cake recipe and make sure it called for the right temperature for the cake. If not, I would then check my favorite cookbook’s temperature chart. When I bought a new oven I discovered that you need to check the accuracy of the oven’s temperature.  My new oven was always 10 degrees less than the setting claimed.

Experiment With Different Kinds Of Cakes

I like to try different kinds of cake recipes, from bundt cakes to angle food cakes.  My family isn’t fussy, they tend to eat any cake that I make.  Trial and error have worked well for me although I have made a few truly miserable cakes when I didn’t pay attention to how much of each ingredient I was using.  I could hear my mother’s voice telling me to follow the recipe, that’s why you have it!

I have also baked many cakes using a microwave. Unlike the oven, you can’t control the temperature in the traditional way and cakes don’t brown. There are some packaged cake mixes that are designed for microwave ovens, that is the only way I would bake a cake in a microwave.  Your toaster oven is a different matter.  It works really well for any cake recipe and you don’t have to change any settings or adjust the recipe.  Most people don’t think of a toaster oven as a small kitchen appliance that can bake cakes, but it works really well.

Baking A Cake Doesn’t Have To  Be Messy

To reduce mess and make baking a breeze, purchase a silicone sheet and line the inner side of your pan with it. If you’re going to be baking a cake using a baking sheet pan, spray it with non-stick spray before lining the pan. This helps reduce the amount of grease that will accumulate on the bottom of the pan, making it easier to remove and clean.

The post Tips For Baking A Cake Like A Pro appeared first on My Best Baking.

Kitchen Mixing Bowls – The Right Choice For All Of Your Needs

A good set of sturdy mixing bowls are a must have home kitchen tool. Many come with a non-stick surface and are perfect for all kinds of mixing operations. Stacking bowls help to de-clutter home kitchen cabinets and have with a stackable design that allows for easy storage.

Stainless steel kitchen mixing bowls have a non-stick surface that makes cleanup easy and reduces the risk of dangerous food poisoning. The bowl’s fine-line design also prevents scratches, leaving them smooth and unbroken for years of hassle-free use. Stainless steel is a common material used for kitchen bowls and these
bowls are great in most cooking and baking situations.  They are lightweight, don’t scratch easily and last a long time.  The downside of stainless steel or aluminum is that they don’t wash well in a dishwasher and they can react badly with some food ingredients.

Many good quality mixing bowl sets come with a collection of lids that allow you to store your favorite foods and leftovers. Some bowls can also include measuring lines, handles, and pour spout.  Many chefs prefer bowls that are stackable, they take up less space in a cupboard and nest together very nicely.

Look For Dishwasher Safe Mixing Bowls

If you hate washing dishes by hand, you will want to look for dishwasher-safe bowls so you don’t have to worry about washing and drying any bowls when they get dirty. Simply tossing the bowl into the dishwasher is the goal of many cooks and bakers, it’s hard to argue with convenience.  Glass, stone, and ceramic mixing bowls are almost always dishwasher friendly.

If you prefer something that is both durable and beautiful then the clear glass mixing bowl would be a great choice. They are made out of high quality glass that is dishwasher safe and are completely clear so you can see what you are adding to the saucepan. Often the bowl has different measurements on the lid so you know exactly how much to use when making a recipe. They come in five different sizes, meaning you will be sure to find the perfect one for your kitchen. This is also very durable, so you won’t have to worry about buying another one shortly after buying one.

Have The Right Kitchen Tools

Good bowls, like a good spatula or a good mixer, are important kitchen tools that every chef and baker should have on hand.  While a bowl may seem basic and unimportant, your baking and cooking life will be a lot easier if you have the right bowls at the ready when you tackle your favorite recipe.

The post Finding Some Really Good Mixing Bowls appeared first on My Best Baking.