Cookbook Profile: Basic Baking Tips and Hints

Tips and Hints from
Basic Baking: Everything You Need to Know
to Get You Started Plus 101
Luscious Desserts That You Can Make

Packed with user-friendly instructions, helpful sidebars and variations, and mouth-watering recipes, Basic Baking: Everything You Need to Know to Get You Started Plus 101 Luscious Desserts That You Can Make, by Lora Brody, is the only help a novice baker will need! Here's just a few helpful hints:

The more focused you are, the better your chances for success. Turn off the phone if you can't ignore its ring. Find someone to watch the kids (or bribe them with the promise of something good to eat as a result of their cooperation). If this is your first time baking, do it alone-you don't need the distraction of company or someone telling you "how to do it."
Use a kitchen timer that clips onto your apron. When you discover your two-year-old painting the VCR with grape jelly, even the most focused cook can forget there's a pie in the oven.
If the top is looking like it might burn, but the inside isn't done, measure a square of heavy-duty aluminum foil that is slightly larger than the top of the pan. Crease the foil, dull side up, to form a tent, and place the tent over the pan. Don't tuck in the sides—you don't want to trap warm air, which will steam the food.
The most important things to know about melting chocolate are: Chocolate melts better and faster when chopped first; water and chocolate are a fatal combination because chocolate will seize if water touches it as it melts; and chocolate burns very easily and cannot be salvaged once it has burned.
The most important key to success in frosting a cake is to make sure that your frosting is completely cool; otherwise, it will melt and slide off the top or squish out from the sides.
I started out using glass baking dishes and then, with the exception of my pie plates, I shifted to metal. Metal browns more evenly than glass, and it doesn't shatter if you drop it on the floor or place it on a cold surface.
You know the expression "garbage in, garbage out"? It means that there's no alchemy that takes place in a 350-degree oven that turns chocolate your kids rejected two Halloweens ago, rancid butter, and poor-quality flour into something you'd want to eat.

Buy the Book!

Basic Baking: Everything You Need
to Know to Get You Started Plus 101
Luscious Desserts That You Can Make
By Lora Brody
Morrow Cookbooks/An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
William Morrow; November 2000
Hardcover $25.00, 325 pages
ISBN: 0-688-16724-1
Information provided by the publisher.