🌡️ The Default Oven Setting For Bake

When I turn my oven on, I hit the "Bake" button to activate the lower element of the oven and the default setting is 350 ºF (as opposed to the "Broil" setting, which sets your oven temperature to 500 °F and activates the top element only to brown the tops of casseroles and crème brûlées).

The 350 ºF setting represents a moderate heat that is hot enough for most cookies to keep their shape, but not so hot that cakes and cookies brown too quickly. Baking at 350 ºF is the equivalent of setting your stove to medium heat. It's not too high and it's not too low.

Recall what happens when we bake: we are hoping that the heat will make its way to the centre of cakes to properly bake the crumb, but for cookies, we may want the outside to bake and set before the inside so it stays a little raw in the middle. With bread, you want to promote rapid rise called "oven spring."

💨 Convection Bake Versus Bake

Convection baking involves forced air that is circulated with a powerful fan. The fan promotes a more even heat distribution, which helps baked goods bake and brown more evenly.

Unfortunately, the fan can be problematic for some delicate recipes because the stronger air current it creates can deflate delicate batters and egg foams. Some recipes may rise unevenly or end up lopsided because the batter is pushed to one side by the fan.

Recipes will bake faster in a convection oven set to 350 ºF versus a regular bake setting of 350 ºF. So in order to reduce browning in a convection oven, you may have to reduce the oven temperature by 25 ºF and bake in a convection oven at 325 ºF instead of 350 ºF.

🎛️ Not All Recipes Bake At 350 ºF

It's true that a lot of recipes start with preheating the oven to bake at 350 ºF. The majority of recipes on this site start with that exact phrase. But actually, there are some recipes that benefit from baking at a different temperature, whether that's higher or lower:

• fruitcakes and recipes with dried or candied fruit should be baked at a lower temperature because these types of cakes are often more dense and take longer to bake properly. To avoid the dried fruit burning, it's better to bake this type of cake at a lower temperature for a longer time. Fruitcakes are often baked at 300 ºF (150 °C) or even 325 ºF (165 °C). This white fruitcake is baked at 325 ºF (165 °C).
• muffins should be baked at a higher temperature to produce a bigger muffin top. I did a test with these honey blueberry muffins to show a higher temperature (425 °F or 220 °C) could lead to a bigger muffin top.
• chocolate chip cookies can be baked at a higher temperature to reduce the spread of cookies.
• if you want thin crispy chocolate chip cookies, bake the dough at a lower setting to promote spreading before the crust sets.
• breads bake at a higher temperature so that the bread pan heats up faster, which in turn speeds up the expansion of the gas bubbles and the rise of the bread before the crust sets. This no-knead cinnamon raisin bread bakes in a Dutch oven that was preheated in a hot oven set to 450 ºF (230 °C).
• enriched breads are baked in a moderate oven, lower than regular "crusty" European breads because these sweeter doughs burn easily. Generally, we bake enriched breads at 350 °F (175 °C)
• if you want to bake flat cake layers, try baking them at a lower temperature. This is useful for a layer cake or stacked cakes. Some professional bakers bake their cake layers at 300 ºF (150 °C) for longer to keep them flat.

While 350 ºF is the default setting for baking on most ovens, I encourage you to explore other temperatures to see the impact of the temperature on your baked goods. Think about the result you want and use that to determine what temperature to set your oven to.

📉 Oven Temperature Conversion Chart

Whether you’re baking in Celsius or Fahrenheit, or using a gas oven with gas mark settings, having a reliable oven temperature conversion chart is essential so you can bake from any recipe that references a temperature in any temperature unit. This quick-reference table will help bakers like you convert between temperature units so you can follow any recipe with confidence—no more guessing or Googling. Save this guide and never worry about oven temperature again!

📈 Oven Temperature Conversion Chart

Want a printable version of this oven temperature chart for bakers?

Get the printable oven temperature chart so you can print it and stick it on your fridge to quickly convert from degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit, or even to gas marks at a glance!

🧮 Oven Temperature Calculator

Need to convert oven temperatures between Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Gas Mark? This free oven temperature converter makes it quick and easy to adjust baking temperatures across different units. Whether you're following a UK recipe in a U.S. kitchen or switching to convection, use this tool to avoid guesswork and endless searching.

📚 Further Reading

• How Baking Works, 3rd edition. Paula Figoni. Buy it on Amazon.
• On Food and Cooking. Harold McGee. Check it out on Amazon.

If you find this article about oven temperature useful (or any other post on my website), please leave a ⭐ star rating and let me know how it helped you in the comments below. I love hearing from you!

The post Why Do We Bake At 350 ºF? appeared first on The Bake School.

Why work with ratios

Whenever I come across a new baking recipe that intrigues me, I always try to work out the ratio to see if this "new to me" recipe fits into a ratio that I am already familiar with. It's a method to dissect a recipe to allow you to understand what makes it tick. It's also a way to learn how recipe writers deviate from the basics to come up with new recipes. 

In baking, it's very difficult to reinvent the cake recipe because at its core, the amounts of each ingredient relative to each other have to fit a certain mould, otherwise you risk throwing off the recipe.For example, if you have a basic vanilla layer cake recipe that you like and you want to adapt it to make it lemon flavoured. You can't just add lemon juice to the recipe and expect the same results, though lemon-flavoured. You have to take away from one ingredient and replace it with the lemon juice, otherwise, you may end up with too much liquid in the batter, resulting in a gummy cake that is impossible to properly bake through. 

The same goes for frostings: if you like Italian meringue buttercream, and you want to turn the vanilla buttercream into an orange buttercream, you can't just add in orange juice. The orange juice will probably lead to a broken buttercream where you've lost the emulsion and the solid fat is separated from the liquid. It would be impossible to fix at that point. 

In order to work with ratios and get creative, you need to understand the roles of the ingredients used in baking and what each ingredient contributes to a recipe. You're also going to have to get very familiar with the ins and outs of baking substitutions. The good news is that baking is pretty logical and once you understand the ingredients, the techniques, and the ratios, you can pretty much create anything you want, with a little dose of experimenting to perfect your final product.

Calculating ratios

I'm trying to recall when did ratios make an appearance when we were in school? A ratio is a fraction, so ratios would have come up in math class: a 1-to-1 ratio can be written as 1:1 and we know that works out to equal parts. Another way to express a one-to-one ratio is 50/50 or as 50 %. Why? Well, if you have two equal parts that are one-to-one, the whole is two parts. And each portion represents half of the whole, i.e. the fraction ½ or 0.5, which translates to 50 % of the whole. Clearly, I'd make a terrible math teacher, so let's move on...

When you want to calculate ratios, you divide all the components by the same number, usually the smallest number of the recipe. The goal is to bring the components down to the smallest whole numbers they can be:

• If I tell you a shortbread recipe is 115 grams of sugar, 230 grams of butter, and 345 grams of flour: divide all the quantities by 115 grams, which leaves you with 1 of sugar, 2 of butter, and 3 of flour. The ratio is 1:2:3, by weight.
• If I tell you the cake is made with 2 cups of butter, 4 cups of sugar, 6 cups of flour: divide all the numbers by 2 cups and you end up with 1 of butter, 2 of sugar, 3 of flour. That's a 1:2:3 ratio, by volume.
• If I tell you the biscuits are made with a recipe that is 60 grams of butter, 120 grams of milk, and 180 grams of flour, divide all the quantities by 60 grams, and you end up with a ratio of 1:2:3, by weight.

One thing to note, when you are working with ratios, you have to know if the ratio is by volume or by weight because volumes and weights are not the same thing!

A few basic baking ratios to remember

The pound cake

The pound cake is based on a ratio by weight and each ingredient must weigh a pound: a pound of butter + a pound of sugar + a pound of eggs + a pound of flour (a 1:1:1:1 ratio by weight). Traditionally, you would use the creaming mixing method to incorporate a ton of air in the butter and sugar before adding the other ingredients. The pound cake used to be made without any leaveners, but these days, we'd rather give our pound cakes a little help with some leavening agents, like baking powder and/or baking soda. Given that the ratio of the pound cake is actually 1:1:1:1, by weight, you can easily scale up or down the recipe to fit your bakeware.

The French "quatre quarts" is also a pound cake

The French cake called "quatre quarts" is made by weighing out quarters, so one quarter of the weight is butter, one quarter of the weight is sugar, one quarter of the weight is eggs, and one quarter of the weight is flour. Guess what: that's exactly the same as the pound cake because all ingredients are equal by weight and the ratio is still 1:1:1:1. Growing up, the quatre quarts were referred to simply as cake because the word "cake" is a French baking term that actually translates to a loaf cake specifically or a cake baked in a loaf pan. Traditionally, the quatre quarts is baked in a loaf pan, which is called "un moule à cake".

Both the pound cake and the quatre quarts have a ratio of 1:1:1:1 of butter/sugar/eggs/flour by weight. 

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The life-changing 1-2-3-4 ratio for cakes

Bundt cake recipes are as easy as 1-2-3-4, though actually the working ratio is better represented by 1:1:2:3:4, by volume. If you can remember those numbers, you can literally make any cake, actually. The base recipe for a bundt is 1 cup butter + 1 cup milk + 2 cups sugar + 3 cups flour + 4 large eggs . That's all you have to remember and that recipe makes enough batter to fit a 10 to 12 cup bundt pan (the big one).

Of course, if you are baking the 1-2-3-4 cake recipe with all-purpose flour, which most of us are, you will need to add leavening agents, like baking powder and/or baking soda to help your cakes rise. To replace the milk, you can use 250 mL (1 cup) of another liquid, like buttermilk, or you can even replace the 250 mL (1 cup) of milk with 375 mL (1.5 cups) of sour cream.

Other ways of tweaking the 1-2-3-4 cake:

• add chunks of chocolate or chocolate chips to the batter, like for this chocolate chip bundt cake
• add fruit, like diced apple, like for this apple bundt cake with salted caramel glaze, but you can also try adding cranberries, chopped pear, or even peaches!
• add spices
• vary the type of sugar and replace some of the granulated sugar with some brown sugar, for example

Shortbread are as easy as 1-2-3

The shortbread ratio is 1 part sugar, 2 parts butter, 3 parts flour, by weight. That's all you need to remember. Then, if you want to make a small batch of shortbread, go with 50 grams of sugar, 100 grams of butter, and 150 grams of flour. If you want to make a bigger batch, weight out 100 grams of sugar, 200 grams of butter, and 300 grams of flour. You can easily scale up and down this recipe to fit the amount of cookies you want to bake, your pan size, the ingredients you have on hand, etc. This ratio can be used for plain shortbread or for fancier recipes like these lavender shortbread dipped in white chocolate.

Biscuits are also as easy as 1-2-3

Biscuits and scones also fall into a 1-2-3 ratio, by weight: 100 grams of butter, 200 grams of liquid, 300 grams of flour. Again, you can scale this recipe up or down depending on how many biscuits or scones you want to make. And you can add a little sugar for sweet biscuits if you want to serve raspberry shortcakes or ice cream strawberry shortcakes for dessert. You can also work in a little sugar to the 1-2-3 ratio if you are making sweet scones, like these lavender white chocolate scones, or these date scones. 

Meringues are 2:1

If you need to make a meringue, just remember that you need 2 parts sugar and 1 part egg whites, by weight, so the meringue ratio is 2:1. Then you can make a little meringue with just 30 grams of egg whites (equivalent to 1 egg white) and 60 grams of sugar, or a lot of meringue with 300 grams of egg whites (from roughly 10 eggs) and 600 grams of sugar. And once you've mastered meringue, you can make an Italian meringue buttercream, for example, by beating in some butter! The same ratio works for pavlovas, and this chocolate pavlova comes pretty close to this ratio. Marshmallow recipes are also sometimes meringue based and again, the 2:1 ratio holds true, like with these vanilla marshmallows.

Resources to help you with bake with ratios

If you want to use ratios more when you bake so that you can start getting creative, I highly recommend a few resources to help you:

• Michael Ruhlman wrote a whole book dedicated to ratios and it's called Ratio. In this book he's documented most of the ratios you might need to bake. You can buy on Amazon 
• Consult the guide to baking conversions and sign up to get the pdf version of the baking conversions chart
• Invest in the book The Baker's Appendix, also available on Amazon, which is another great resource for understanding how to convert ingredients from one unit of measure to another, like from cups to grams
• Get a kitchen scale, so that you can work with ratios by weight, and not just ratios by volume. I love my OXO kitchen scale and the newest version is available on Amazon.
• Get familiar with baking conversions and get the baking conversions charts if you haven't already.

Realistically, you will find along that way that you can't simplify every single baking recipe to a neat and tidy ratio, like 1-2-3-4. Trust me, I try to all the time and I get frustrated. Still, the exercise of analyzing a recipe, breaking it down into the ingredients, the ratios, and the techniques will make you a better baker and is key to mastering baking! And when you realize that most baking recipes fit some sort of formula or ratio, it's very exciting and opens up the doors to so many creative possibilities.

Need more help with baking conversions?

Most of us aren't born with a natural ability to convert ingredients from cups to grams or ounces. If you would like to learn more about converting recipes from volume to weight measurements, you need the Baking Ingredient conversions chart.

The post How to use baking ratios appeared first on The Bake School.

There's nothing worse than going to the effort of making homemade jam and after all that work, you open a jar and find that the jam is very loose and watery, so much so it runs right off your morning toast. This is a scenario that can be avoided if you understand what makes jam runny, how to get it to set properly, and all the tips and tricks that you can use to determine if your jam will set before you can it in Mason jars.

What makes jam set

Jam is made from such a short and simple list of ingredients: just fruit and sugar, really! So how does this combination of ingredients lead to a spreadable thick consistency? There are three key components to achieving the perfect set:

• sugar—sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs water
• pectin—a polysaccharide (yes, that means it's a carbohydrate, like sugar, but much larger) that forms a network with water, trapping it
• evaporation—if you don't boil your jam for long enough, there will be too much water in the mixture, and not enough pectin and sugar to trap it.

Learn more

Jam is nothing more than a sugar syrup with fruit in it. Find out how sugar syrup temperature affects its texture with this useful temperature chart!

Buy the chart

The goal when you make jam is to concentrate the fruit and sugar through evaporation and to trap the remaining water so that the jam sets perfectly.

Pectin content in fruit

Some fruit are naturally high in pectin, others are low in pectin. The pectin content in fruit is also dependent on the ripeness of the fruit. Slightly under-ripe fruit are higher in pectin than ripe fruit. The riper, older fruit have less pectin because it breaks down. If your market is selling you over-ripe berries for making jam, don't buy them. Or combine them with some less mature fruit. Jam fruit should be just ripe and combined with under-ripe so you have enough pectin to work with. Otherwise, you may have to add pectin (or combine them with a higher pectin fruit) to get your jam to set.

Here's a list of high pectin fruit:

• apples
• citrus
• currants
• cranberries
• plums
• quince

Here's a list of low pectin fruit:

• apricots
• blueberries
• cherries
• peaches and nectarines
• strawberries
• rhubarb

The reasons jam doesn't set

It's really disappointing when you open a jar of homemade jam to find it's very loose or watery. It makes it hard to spread it on toast because it runs right off the edges of the bread and it also leads to soggy toast because the crumb of the slice soaks it up like a sponge. Here are some of the main reasons why your jam doesn't set:

1. there isn't enough sugar—you need to use one part sugar for every two parts of fruit, by weight. In other words, the weight of sugar you need to use is half the weight of fruit (example: use 500 grams of sugar for every 1 kilogram of washed, trimmed fruit)
2. there isn't enough pectin—use a combination of ripe and slightly under-ripe fruit
3. you didn't heat the jam for long enough which likely means you have too much water in it—it's too dilute
4. you didn't heat the jam enough to hit the jam setting point (around 104 °C or 220 °F).

When you break it down, making jam is about evaporating a lot of the water and trapping the rest of it. If you don't boil the jam long enough, there will be too many water molecules floating around and not enough pectin and sugar to trap it so that the jam sets.

Ways to determine set

Jam makers have different ways of determining set. Here are a few telltale signs of whether your jam will be thick and spreadable, or watery and runny.

The freezer plate test

To determine jam set using the freezer plate test, you need to pre-freeze a stack of side plates overnight. I usually freeze four or five. But usually I'll only use one or two. Better safe than sorry.

To do the freezer plate test, here are the steps to follow:

1. Pre-freeze a stack of side plates overnight so that they are very cold.
2. When it's time to check the set of your boiling jam, pull the pan off the burner.
3. Retrieve one plate from the freezer to use immediately.
4. With a small spoon, take a dollop of the hot jam and place it in the centre of the frozen plate.
5. Put the plate with the jam back in the freezer right away.
6. Freeze for 1–2 minutes to cool down the dollop of jam.
7. Take the plate out of the freezer, and with the tip of your index finger, nudge the edges of the dollop. Watch how the jam behaves.
8. If the edges and the surface of the jam wrinkle when pushed, you've hit the setting point.
9. If the surface of the jam looks shiny and fluid still and doesn't wrinkle, it's likely not boiled enough and too loose to hold its shape.
10. If the jam fails the frozen plate test, put the pot of jam back on the burner and continue boiling.
11. Keep testing until you've achieved the right set.

The sheet test

When you lift your spatula (or wooden spoon) out of the jam above the pot, watch how the jam drips off the spoon. Does it cling to the spatula? Does it immediately drip off like sugary water?

To check how the jam falls off your spoon or spatula, make sure to lift the spoon high above the pot, almost at eye level. This ensures that the jam cools down just slightly, enough to show you how it will behave when it cools down.

Watching the bubbles

I highly recommend you take the time to observe the bubbles as the jam boils. This is a valuable lesson that Camilla Wynne taught me when I took her class on making marmalade at home.

When you first heat fruit and sugar together, the sugar and heat will draw out the water from the fruit, leading to a very soupy, watery mixture.

As the mixture heats up, the water will begin to boil. The mixture is very volatile and the bubbles are very unstable: they form and burst almost instantaneously.

As you approach the jam setting point, you will notice that the bubbles become more stable on the surface of the jam mixture. They will form and remain there, blinking back at you like fish eyes.

By watching the bubbles and even taking pictures throughout the boiling process, you will begin to notice the difference in bubbles between a boiling watery jam that won't set and a jam that was boiled to the setting point.

Monitoring temperature—jam setting point

Using temperature as a gauge for whether or not your homemade jam will set is a little controversial. There are a lot of professional jam makers who will tell you not to use a thermometer at all. Or they will recommend that you save the thermometer for the canning process.

It's true that watching the temperature can be tricky and lead to errors. You may overcook your jam if:

• your thermometer isn't fast-reading
• your thermometer isn't calibrated

You also may undercook your jam if you don't make sure the jam holds the jam setting temperature for long enough, leading to a runnier, softer set.

Still, for beginner jam makers who haven't practiced enough to be able to visually tell a loose jam from a set jam, I think temperature is helpful. If your thermometer says your jam is at 213 °F, you know it's too fluid and you need to boil more. If your thermometer says 218 °F, you know your jam is getting close to the setting point, and you need to be much more attentive.

Let the thermometer guide you, but make sure to watch what the jam looks like and use other tests to gauge what's happening in the pot of jam. This will make you a better jam maker and you will learn a lot with each batch of jam you make.

When to ignore the jam setting temperature

Sometimes I don't cook a batch of jam to the jam setting point. If visually, I can tell the jam is done with the other cues, like sheeting, the bubbles, and/or the plate test, I may stop it early.

As a rule I always try to boil up to or over 218 °F. If I can get it to 220 °F, then I know my jam will be well gelled, and if I go below the jam setting point, I know it may have a looser consistency.

Remember that if you don't boil your jam enough, the flavour may be watered down and the texture will be looser.

A trick for improving jam set

Add a high pectin fruit

If you are working with over-ripe fruit or low pectin fruit, you should combine them with under-ripe fruit or a higher pectin fruit. For example, for this jalapeño jam, you will notice there is an apple in the recipe. That's because jalapeños don't have much pectin, but apples do. And if you boil the jam ingredients with a chopped apple, it will set almost like jelly if boiled for long enough!

You could also consider including a citrus fruit (like a lemon or orange). Citrus fruit are very high in pectin, so by adding a chopped citrus fruit, you are adding more pectin. Just remember that you need to boil the citrus fruit first to soften the skin before you use it in a jam recipe. Otherwise the skin will be very tough.

This strawberry and red currant jam sets more easily than a plain strawberry jam or strawberry rhubarb jam. Red currants are high in pectin, whereas strawberries are lower in pectin, and rhubarb has the least amount of pectin.

Also remember that you need to use enough sugar. If you cut the sugar from a jam recipe, expect it to be on the runny side.

Tip: Weigh the washed, trimmed fruit. Calculate half the weight of fruit. That's the weight of sugar you need for your jam to set well. So two parts fruit for 1 part sugar, by weight. This is different than marmalade, which is made with roughly equal parts sugar and fruit, by weight.

Adding water to make jam

There's a common misconception that you need to add water to fruit and sugar to make jam. The same misconception exists with marmalade. Actually, you don't add any water to make jam (or you may add very little for finer cut marmalades, like this lime marmalade).

The water in jam comes from the fruit. Most fruits are made up of over 90 % water. So when you make jam with 1 kilogram of fruit, that is 900 grams of water (more or less). As you heat the fruit with sugar to make jam (or even if you simply stir the two ingredients together), you'll see that the sugar will draw water from the fruit and form a syrup. You don't need to add water to make jam! The water is already in the fruits you are working with.

Frequently asked questions

Small batch jam recipes to try

Now that you know how to achieve the perfect set when you make jam, here are some recipes to practice it on:

• apricot jam (no pectin added)
• peach jam (which I've even successfully tested with mealy peaches and you can't tell the peaches weren't great)
• small batch rhubarb jam without pectin
• blueberry jam without pectin added
• jalapeño jam (with an apple to boost pectin)
• strawberry and red currant jam

Baked goods made with it and what to serve with jam

When you practice making jam at home, you will inevitably wind up with many jars of jam. It makes a great gift, but you should also keep some for yourself to enjoy and to bake with! Here are a few ideas of what you can bake with jam and what to serve with it:

• Jam-filled shortbread cookies
• Thumbprint cookies
• Bostock
• Scones
• Butter biscuits
• Brioche kneaded in the stand mixer

The post The jam setting point and how to determine jam set appeared first on The Bake School.

Baking soda vs baking powder: what's the difference?

A box of baking soda is 100 % sodium bicarbonate and contains no other ingredients but this alkaline powder. Baking soda is shelf stable, meaning that you can store it for quite a long time without it breaking down or reacting. Baking soda, when hydrated and mixed with an acid (like buttermilk or sour cream in a recipe), will  break down to form the gas carbon dioxide, which helps your cakes rise.

On the other hand, baking powder is a powder mix of multiple ingredients: baking powder combines baking soda, an acid (or two), and cornstarch (to absorb any moisture and keep the powder dry). So while baking soda has to be combined with an acid to make your cakes rise, baking powder has everything needed in the one powder to help cakes rise. 

When does a recipe need baking powder?

Use baking powder in "pH-neutral" recipes

In simple recipes, like in this vanilla cake with chocolate frosting or this Earl Grey cake, you'll notice that the list of ingredients includes: butter, sugar, vanilla, eggs, flour, salt, milk. This cake recipe doesn't include any acidic ingredients. If you made this recipe without any chemical leavener, you would end up with a dense cake with a tighter crumb, like a pound cake.

Any lightness or airiness in a cake, in the absence of chemical leaveners, would have to be worked in by hand, by properly creaming the butter and the sugar at the first step to incorporate enough air to lighten the cake. With this recipe, if you want to add extra fluffiness and open up the crumb of the cake, baking soda wouldn't work in this case because there isn't an acid in the ingredient list. Remember baking soda reacts with an acid to produce carbon dioxide to help your cakes rise. Without an acid in the ingredient list, the baking soda wouldn't react much, if at all. Your final cake will have unreacted baking soda in it, which might contribute off-flavours to your cake and cause it to brown excessively in the oven (just like when you add too much baking soda), the texture will be just as dense and tight as the recipe without baking soda.

The fact is that in a simple cake recipe that is butter, sugar, vanilla, eggs, flour, salt, and milk, baking soda is not the right chemical leavener for the job. You need to add baking powder, which is what I did when I developed the above-mentioned cake recipes.  

When does a recipe need baking soda?

Baking soda helps acid-containing baked goods rise

You add baking powder to recipes that don't have any ingredients that can contribute some acidity. When do you need baking soda and not baking powder? In a recipe like this Irish soda bread with raisins, you'll notice the bread is made with 2 cups of buttermilk. Buttermilk is acidic and so, in order to provide a lift to this bread dough, to open up the crumb and create a nice bread with a good texture, you have to add baking soda to react with the buttermilk to help the bread rise. The baking soda will react with the acids in the buttermilk to form carbon dioxide, which will help your soda bread rise.

In the case of this Irish soda bread, baking powder wouldn't be a great candidate because baking powder is made up of baking soda and an acid (or two). If your bread recipe is already providing a lot of acid (2 cups of buttermilk), this would mean that the baking soda in the baking powder will react with the acids in the buttermilk. That's great! Your bread will rise. Goal achieved!

But the problem here is that the baking soda will react with the acids of the buttermilk first, not the acids from the baking powder. You will inevitably end up with leftover acids from the baking powder (which are slower to react), and some of these unreacted acids may contribute off-flavours to your baked goods. Yikes! Leftover buttermilk acids would contribute a pleasant flavour, like buttermilk, but leftover acids from baking powder (like monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum sulfate, or sodium acid pyrophosphate) might not taste as good.

So when a recipe has a lot of acid, you need to add baking soda to help your baked goods rise (whether a cake or a bread).

Add in a little extra baking soda to give baked goods a better colour

In some recipes, you might add a little extra baking soda so that your baked goods will brown more in the oven. Remember that Maillard browning is faster under alkaline conditions. So a little baking soda might increase the pH enough to help your baked goods brown. This is especially true with cookies, which bake for under 20 minutes (usually as little as 8 minutes). Many cookie recipes will include some baking soda to help them turn golden brown delicious in the brief time they spend in the oven.

When does a recipe need both baking soda and baking powder?

When I was researching baked donut recipes last month, I noticed that there were a lot of variations in the chemical leaveners used from one recipe to another: some called for baking soda, others baking powder, some called for a combination of both, and then there were the recipes that also included vinegar in the mix. So when I was working on these baked donuts with almond milk, I decided I might as well investigate and see if there was any benefit to using one or the other, or all of them.

Use both baking powder and baking soda to give your baked goods an extra "boost"

In some recipes, the amount of baking soda added is enough to neutralize the acids in the recipe, but the amount of carbon dioxide that is formed might not be significant enough to contribute enough rising power for your baked goods. Your recipe might need an extra boost of rising power. That's when you'll see both baking powder and baking soda used together. The baking soda (coming from both the baking powder and the baking soda itself) will react quickly with the acidic ingredients (like buttermilk, sour cream, or yogurt), and then the leftover baking soda will react with the other acids coming from  baking powder which are slower to react and sometimes only react with the heat of the oven. This chocolate chip bundt cake made with sour cream is a perfect example of using both baking soda and baking powder in a cake recipe with an acidic ingredient. 

Use both baking powder and baking soda to make your baked goods golden brown delicious 

Adding only baking powder to a recipe could mean that your cake batter or your cookie dough is pH neutral or even slightly acidic, depending on the ingredients. There's nothing wrong with that, except that we know that some of the essential browning reactions (Maillard browning) in baking only happens under alkaline (basic) conditions. These browning reactions are vital to producing the visually appealing golden brown delicious colour of baked goods and also for producing some important flavour compounds. There are recipes that are made with both baking powder (for leavening) and baking soda (to facilitate browning by increasing the pH making batters and dough a little more alkaline).

Coming back to my baked donuts with almond milk tests: all the recipes I tested out made perfectly good baked donuts, but I honestly felt that the flavour of the recipe containing baking powder and a touch of vinegar was the best—the almond flavour was the most pronounced. The other thing I noticed, not surprisingly, was that the recipes with a little extra baking soda browned better. That's the Maillard reaction, which is faster at higher pH, a.k.a. when your batter has a little more baking soda in it (but remember the right amount of baking soda is key and too much baking soda can lead to over-browning and a soapy flavour!). I figure that many baked donut recipes contain extra baking soda to speed up the browning process since baked donuts are only in the oven for a dozen or so minutes. Without the help of baking soda, your baked donuts have a very pale look to them. Personally, I think that if you are going to glaze the donut anyways, the extra baking soda isn't really all that necessary. Plus the difference in colour is so minimal.

Substituting baking soda with baking powder

Substituting one chemical leavener for another can be very tricky. Here are some guidelines to help you substitute baking soda for baking powder, and baking powder for baking soda. In all cases, you will inevitably have to do some testing and adjustments to get the recipe right if you are making substitutions like these.

If you want to replace baking powder with baking soda, add less baking soda and add an acid to the recipe

Remember that baking powder is a combination of baking soda, an acid (or two acids), and cornstarch. Baking powder contains 3 ingredients and therefore is "heftier" than baking soda, which is pure sodium bicarbonate. So when you bake with baking powder, you'll notice the volume of baking powder you scoop is much larger than the volume of baking soda. For every teaspoon of baking powder, replace with ¼ teaspoon of baking soda + make sure to add an acid. In cakes, if you are replacing baking powder with baking soda, you would need to replace the milk in the recipe with the same volume of buttermilk or plain yogurt, for example. If you don't have buttermilk, you could also acidify the volume of milk needed with some white vinegar.

If you want to replace baking soda with baking powder, add more baking powder and reduce the acid in the recipe

Since baking powder is heftier than baking soda, you cannot simply replace ¼ teaspoon baking soda with ¼ teaspoon baking powder. This likely won't be enough chemical leavener for your recipe. A rule of thumb for replacing baking soda with baking powder: add 4 times more baking powder than you would baking soda, so replace ¼ teaspoon baking soda with 1 teaspoon baking powder. If you replace all the baking soda in a recipe with baking powder, consider also reducing or eliminating the major sources of acidity in your recipe. For example, in a cake recipe, you might want to replace the buttermilk with plain milk if you are using baking powder and no baking soda. 

Further reading:

• The complete guide to leavening agents and chemical leaveners in baking, covering everything from chemical leaveners to biological leaveners, but also how you can mechanically incorporate air into recipes to contribute rise
• The complete guide to baking powder, including all the different types, how to make your own, how to check if your baking powder is still good, and much more
• Everything you need to know about baking soda in baking, how baking soda works, what it does to your recipes, and what happens if you add too much
• Kitchen Geekery article on Food Bloggers of Canada for a crash course on two essential chemical leaveners in baking.

The post Baking soda vs baking powder: which chemical leavener do you need? appeared first on The Bake School.

What causes a cake to sink?

The cake collapses because your oven isn't hot enough or your cake is under-baked

Your cakes may collapse if your oven temperature is too low. I always keep an oven thermometer in my oven to make sure that my oven is properly preheated before I put cakes in to bake.

The oven thermometer never leaves my oven. I shift it from one rack to another, as needed, but I rely on the thermometer to tell me what temperature my oven is. I like to use a ChefAlarm digital thermometer with an air probe attachment.

The heat of the oven is vital for encouraging baking powder to react so your cakes rise but also for the structure of the cake to set. If there's not enough heat to set the crust and the crumb inside, the cake may rise and fall.

Furthermore, if you didn't leave your cake to bake for long enough, your cakes will also sink. For butter cakes, like this vanilla butter cake, I look for certain signs before I remove them from the oven. Here are a few ways to check if your cake is done baking:

1. the skewer test: I poke the centre of the cake with a cake tester (like this one from Amazon) to see if it's still wet inside. If the tester comes out clean, the cake should be done (although some cakes are sneaky and may pass the skewer test but still require more oven time... that's a whole other story).
2. the edges: I look at the edges of the cake, which should be nicely golden brown all around, especially in the area closest to the pan. The edges of the cake should have pulled away from the sides of the pan, a telltale sign the cake is baked through.
3. the tap test: I give the top of the cake a light, gentle tap/poke with my hand. It should feel a little bouncy and possibly even spring back. If you press the cake and it makes a dent and it feels very "delicate" in an unset/wet cake kind of way. The cake isn't done. It's hard to explain, but when you press a cake that's not totally baked through and then you press it again when it's properly baked, you will feel that when the cake is cooked, it takes on a certain firmness and strength, though very delicate.
4. the temperature: use an instant-read thermometer like the Thermapen or the Thermoworks ThermoPop to measure the internal temperature of your cake. When it's done baking, it should read 100 ºC or 212 ºF. 

The cake sinks because it lacks structure

If you don't include enough structure-building ingredients in your recipe, the cake may collapse on itself. As the cake bakes, pushed upwards in the pan from carbon dioxide and steam, the cake needs support to maintain that volume and to set the height in place. If not, the cake will collapse on itself. This can even happen in the oven. There are a couple reasons a cake can lack enough support.

1. not enough gluten: I've noticed this from playing around with gluten-free cake recipes especially. Gluten plays an important structural role, even in cakes. And so, when I develop gluten-free cake recipes, if I don't add a structure-providing ingredient, like extra egg, some xanthan gum or even ground chia/flax to compensate for the lack of gluten, the cake collapses on itself. This can even happen in the oven, before it's done baking (particularly tragic!). The cake can't support all that air and height and it falls, leading to a sunken, sometimes greasy cake that isn't very tasty or appetizing. I wrote about the process of developing a gluten-free cake made from mashed potatoes.
2. not enough eggs, particularly the egg whites: Eggs provide structure and support to a cake as it bakes. The proteins in eggs coagulate and help contribute to the set of the cake, allowing your cakes to hold on to the height achieved in the oven. Not enough egg means not enough coagulation, and therefore not enough structure.

Too much of an ingredient can cause a cake to collapse

This relates to a lack of structure too, but if your ingredient ratio in your recipe is off, and there's too much of a certain ingredient, this can be quite disastrous because the recipe has too much of that something and not enough structure to hold it all together. The main culprits in this case are:

1. too much fat: fat adds extra tenderness to a cake, sure, but too much tenderness comes with a lack of structure and collapsing. You have to find the right balance between tenderness from fat and structure.
2. too much sugar: again, if that sugar is not balanced out with more eggs or more flour in your recipe, you're going to have a collapsed cake, and also a crumbly cake from lack of structure.
3. too much leavener (baking powder or baking soda): think about it, the more leavener you have, the more gas will form inside the cake, and if there isn't a growing structure to support all that extra gas, the gas will escape. The cake will rise up and then collapse back down. Remember when I did the experiment to show the impact of too much baking soda? The cakes made with less baking soda rose far more. In retrospect, that was probably because the cakes with more leavener rose and collapsed, and also because the pH affects the structural proteins, preventing them from assembling.
4. too much liquid: again, extra liquid has to come with extra structure, or else there could be trouble.

Essentially, too much of certain ingredients (fat, sugar, leavening agent, liquid) can lead to cake collapse, while not enough of other ingredients (eggs and flour) can also lead to cake collapse. It's so important to properly measure ingredients for baking, but also to bake from reliable recipes that have been tested.

Taking a cake out of the oven before it's baked through is also to blame. Are there any other reasons I might have missed that you can think of?

How to avoid cake collapse and cake sinking as they cool?

Knowing how to test when a cake is done baking is essential to successful baking and to avoid cake collapse. It seems obvious but, if you are baking a recipe that you are familiar with and have successfully tested before, your cake sank simply because it wasn't baked enough or because you skipped a step, an ingredient, or maybe you added too much of something. It happens. 

If you are baking a new recipe that you aren't familiar with, perhaps there's a typo in the recipe that the author didn't catch and some ingredient is missing (or perhaps too much of an ingredient was listed by accident). This also happens a lot.

For Angel food cakes, cool the cake upside down

There is a trick to prevent sponge cakes like Angel food cakes from sinking: cool these cakes upside down! By cooling the cake upside down, the cake has plenty of room to stretch out of the pan, instead of collapsing into the bottom of the pan.

Cooling certain sponge cakes upside down leads to a taller cake and a lighter texture. But this only works for sponge cakes baked in ungreased pans/unfloured pans because these cakes stick to the sides of pan. A regular vanilla cake would fall right out of the cake pan if cooled upside down because of the nature of the cake and the way the cake pan is prepared before baking.  

A science theory about cake collapse:

You might recall, in my post about the best baking and baking science books, I mentioned reading, in "The Science of Cooking," (available on Amazon) that Peter Barham claims to prevent a cake from collapsing as it cools, you have to drop it on the counter. He writes that cakes collapse as they cool because steam condenses in the cake bubbles. 

The cake bubbles shrink because air can't get into those cake bubbles to replace the volume lost. Shrinking bubbles means shrinking cake, basically, and the shrinking occurs most towards the middle of the cake because the centre of the cake is softer, while the crust is too dry and stiff to contract.

Barham goes on to offer a way of preventing cake collapse, specifically stating that "Dropping the cake, from a height of about 30 cm on to a hard surface, passes a shock through the bubble walls and allows some of them to break, converting the cake from a closed to an open cell structure. Now air is able to get into the broken bubbles and the cake will not collapse."

Obviously, I had to test this to see for myself.

Cake collapse experiment:

I made my go-to vanilla cake recipe (that I've modified to make the cardamom cranberry cake and the Earl Grey cake), which happens to make 3 layers of cake. This way I could have my control sample, which is a cake that goes straight from oven to cooling rack without any jostling or dropping, and then 2 cakes that I drop immediately after removing from the oven. Fun times, I tell you!

I used straws and a Sharpie marker to mark the heights of the cake, immediately after baking, and then after cooling. Then I measured the change in height. All the cakes lost a little height upon cooling, but go figure, the cake that wasn't dropped shrank the least (about 1–2 mm), while the dropped cakes shrank about 3–4 mm.

Basically, there was more cake collapse observed if I dropped the cakes from a height of 30 cm. That's exactly what I was expecting and the opposite of what Peter Barham claimed. Cakes are fragile when they come out of the oven. It seems pretty logical to me that if you drop a cake when it's most fragile, it will collapse a little from the shock. Right? I made this "quirky" video for you to illustrate my experiment.

Final thoughts

By the way, looking at the inside of this cake, we see that I had large holes in the cake, but writing this post made me realize a few things: given the big bubbles inside and the spotting that I've been observing on the surface of my cakes (look at the 1st photo of this post again), I'm wondering if I'm working with too much leavener in my cake recipe. I use 2 teaspoon baking powder for 2 cups of flour, but according to some baking references, my recipe might only need ½ teaspoon per cup (therefore 1 teaspoon baking powder for 2 cups of flour).

This means, my working recipe might possibly have more baking powder than is needed, specifically double. I have also been wondering if I need a touch more milk/wet ingredients in my recipe. Perhaps the batter is a little too thick and this is leading to pockets of air that can't easily be smoothed or tapped out before baking. All that to say: clearly, I need to make more cakes!

The post Why do cakes sink? appeared first on The Bake School.

If you are struggling to bake the best chocolate chip cookies, just how you like them, read about why cookies spread flat when they bake. You'll also find out ways to troubleshoot this problem and rectify it.

If you have the opposite problem and your cookies are always too thick, read about the reasons why cookies don't spread.

Reasons Cookies Spread

1. too much of certain ingredients relative to others will cause spreading:
   • too much butter, which melts and causes the dough to flatten out thin
   • too much sugar in the dough will cause spreading and thinner cookies
   • too much egg relative to other ingredients can lead to a cakey cookie and cause the edges to spread out more
   • too much baking soda raises the pH of the dough and this can disrupt the gluten network, leading to thinner cookies with less structure.
2. not enough of certain ingredients relative to others will cause spreading:
   • not enough flour will cause cookies to spread because flour provides structure to hold the ingredients together
   • not enough add-ins (inclusions) in the case of chocolate chip cookies and other drop cookies will cause cookies to spread. For example, if you are following this recipe for spelt flour chocolate chip cookies with chopped walnuts in the dough or these chocolate chip cookies with pecans, if you omit the nuts, your cookies will spread out more. The nuts prevent the dough from spreading out too quickly. You need to replace them with another inclusion to maintain the desired thickness.
3. white sugar versus brown sugar:
   1. white sugar can lead to flatter cookies
   2. brown sugar can make cookies thicker because it may cause some of the baking soda to react, forming carbon dioxide, a gas that will help cookie dough rise up.
4. using baking soda instead of baking powder—in cookie dough, baking soda tends to promote spreading, whereas baking powder promotes puffing and rising. If you replace baking powder in a crinkle cookie with baking soda, your cookies may spread thin and might not crack the way you expect them to. Read about baking soda versus baking powder if you aren't sure what the difference is.
5. the temperature of the ingredients: if the ingredients, especially butter, are too warm, they can cause the dough to spread while baking, especially if you don't chill the dough before baking your cookies. Read about why you should chill cookie dough sometimes.
6. using a different type of flour: in some cookie recipes, you may swap one type of flour for another. But most of the time, it's not a simple substitution, gram-for-gram. For example, replacing all-purpose flour in a chocolate chip cookie recipe with spelt flour. You will have to do several test batches to find out how much flour you need to achieve the texture you are seeking. For these spelt chocolate chip cookies, I discovered that I needed 60 grams (½ cup) more spelt flour compared to my best chocolate chip cookie recipe made with all-purpose.
7. over-mixing the dough, especially when combining the butter and sugar(s), and eggs. Too much air incorporated at this stage can cause cookies to spread
8. baking sheet material: The type of baking sheet and how it is prepared can also affect cookie spread. Lighter cookie sheets or insulated sheets (with air in them) can cause cookies to spread more. Silicone baking mats which reduce the browning of cookies can also cause cookies to spread more as they bake. To understand the role of your bakeware, read about baking pans and also why cookies end up dark on the bottom
9. oven temperature: If the oven is not hot enough, it can cause cookies to spread too quickly and become thin. The butter melts faster than the edges set, leading to a thinner cookie. Read all about what happens when we bake to better understand the role of the oven temperature.
10. oven rack position: baking cookies on the top rack when your oven is set to "bake" can mean that the cookies take longer to bake than if you set the pan in the middle of the oven. Read about oven rack positions to find out why the middle rack is best for cookies.
11. overcrowding the cookie sheet: recall the French baking term "quinconce" which refers to the staggered placement of cookie dough scoops on a sheet pan. If you don't leave enough room between scoops of cookie dough on a cookie sheet, there is a greater risk that the hot airflow around the cookies will be impeded and therefore the cookies may melt further out, spreading into each other before the edges have a chance to set.
12. baking on a cookie sheet that is warm: if you set your cookie dough on a hot or warm sheet pan, that residual warmth will melt the butter too fast and will cause your cookies to spread out too quickly.
13. not preheating your oven sufficiently: remember it can take 30 minutes for an oven to preheat to the set temperature and to stabilize. If you put your cookies to bake in an oven before that, the oven temperature may be too low, leading to the dough melting and spreading out faster than the edges set.
14. opening the oven door too frequently leading to a drop in the oven temperature

Ways To Stop Cookies From Spreading In The Oven

If you struggle with flat cookies that bake thinner than you want them or spread out too much in the oven, here are some tricks you can try to fix your recipe and improve your baking techniques.

Like with any tweaks to a recipe and baking techniques, you may have to do a few tests to make cookies with the desired texture and thickness. Some of these are easy fixes and others are a little more complicated. Here are a few tweaks that you can test out to find what works for you and your cookie recipes:

• Don't overwhip the butter and sugar and eggs when you first begin to make your cookie dough—too much air can cause the cookies to expand in the oven as they heat up, and then they collapse more.
• Chill your cookie dough—even just 30 minutes in the refrigerator can minimize spreading for some cookie recipes! This is the first step I would take if a cookie is spreading too much.
• Preheat your oven for at least 20–30 minutes to ensure it's hot and the temperature is more stable.
• Always bake on a cooled sheet pan and let your sheet pan cool completely between batches before placing scoops of dough on it.
• Reduce the sugar in your dough recipe—sometimes cutting out as little as 50 grams (¼ cup) of sugar from a cookie dough will reduce the spread and lead to thicker cookies
• Increase the flour in your recipe—sometimes just 30–60 grams (¼–½ cup) more of flour can improve the texture of your cookies
• Switch from baking by volume to baking by weight, especially when it comes to flour! Get a kitchen scale if you don't already own one and this baking ingredient conversion chart to help you convert your recipes quickly and easily.
• Reduce the baking soda—if your cookie dough has a large amount of baking soda and no obvious acid (or not enough acid) to balance it out, consider reducing the baking soda slightly. For example, instead of using 5 mL (1 teaspoon) of baking soda in your dough, try using 2.5 mL (½ teaspoon) instead and see the impact it has on the baked cookies.
• Bake cookies at a higher oven temperature—I like thick, chewy drop cookies, so I tend to bake most of my drop cookies at 375 °F or even 400 °F. This is a personal preference, but if you like the taste of your cookie recipe, but the cookies are too thin, try baking them at a higher temperature and see if you get thicker cookies.
• Bake only a few cookies at a time on a half-sheet pan and make sure to leave enough room between them.
• Bake cookies on a parchment-lined aluminum sheet pan
• Don't flatten mounds of cookie dough before baking—leave the scoops of cookie dough as is to ensure they don't melt too fast.

Tricks For Fixing Thin Cookies

There's no magical solution to fix your cookies if you've baked an entire batch and they are thin. You can't undo that. But if you catch them at the right time, you can nudge them into being thicker. Here's how:

• take a spoon, a mini offset spatula, or a large round cookie cutter with a diameter that is larger than your cookies
• use your chosen tool (whether a spoon, an offset spatula, or a cookie cutter), and nudge the edges toward the centre of the cookie
  • Use the back of the spoon or the flat side of the offset spatula to carefully push the edges toward the centre
  • Place the cookie cutter around the hot cookie and using a swirling motion, the edges will naturally pull inwards

This method will only work if the cookies are still hot and soft. You have to do this when the cookies are still pliable and too delicate to lift off the sheet pan, so before they've had a chance to cool down. Some bakers will use this trick mid-bake, when the cookie edges haven't set at all. Try it out and find the timing that works best for you!

If your cookies are too firm, this trick will not work. You can try popping the sheet pan back in the oven, but even then, you might not be as successful if the edges have set hard. For this trick to work, act fast as soon as you take the cookies out of the oven or when they are slightly underbaked.

This trick works better for drop cookies. Sugar cookies and cutout cookies are too firm. In the case of cutout cookies, you can take the cookie cutter you used and trim the edges that spread out. This is a technique that is used for gingerbread houses to ensure the edges are straight and flat, and also for decorated cutout sugar cookies to ensure the shape is perfect before decorating with royal icing.

The post Flat Cookies And Reasons They Spread Thin appeared first on The Bake School.

Reasons Cookies Don't Spread

In the photo below, I was testing out how to replace all-purpose flour with rye flour in a chocolate chip cookie recipe. The cookies didn't spread much at all as they baked. Here are some reasons why cookies don't spread:

1. too much of certain ingredients relative to others:
   • too much flour
   • too many inclusions or add-ins (especially chopped chocolate and nuts in cookies can stop cookies from spreading)
2. not enough of certain ingredients relative to others will prevent spreading:
   • not enough sugar (like if you cut or reduce the sugar in a recipe) will reduce spreading
   • not enough liquid
   • not enough eggs
3. using the wrong type of flour (or another ingredient): for example, replacing all-purpose flour with whole grain rye flour, gram-for-gram, can lead to very fat, thick cookies that don't spread at all when you bake them. Be very careful when making baking substitutions like this
4. over-mixing the dough once the flour is added could cause too much gluten to develop, giving the dough the ability to better hold its shape and more structure—this is unlikely in cookie doughs with high amounts of fat and sugar, but overmixing at this stage still isn't recommended
5. insufficient baking soda: in cookie doughs, baking soda tends to promote spreading and if you omit it, your cookies may be thicker than anticipated.
6. using baking powder instead of baking soda: baking powder promotes puffing and rising. Read about baking soda versus baking powder if you aren't sure what the difference is.
7. using a dark metal sheet pan can create thicker cookies because the dark metal heats up much faster and therefore the bottom and edges of the cookies will set faster before the cookies have a chance to spread out. To understand the role of your bakeware, read about baking pans and also why cookies end up dark on the bottom
8. oven temperature: If the oven is too hot, it can cause the edges and outside of the cookies to set too fast. Then as the inside heats up, the cookies can't spread out at all, and they may even crack. Read all about what happens when we bake to better understand the role of the oven temperature.
9. oven rack position: baking cookies on the bottom rack when your oven is set to "bake" can mean that the cookies bake too fast if you set the sheet pan on the bottom rack of the oven. Read about oven rack positions to find out why the middle rack is best for cookies.

Ways To Make Thinner Cookies

Some people love thin, flat cookies, and others like thicker cookies. If you like the taste of your cookies, but you wish they weren't so thick, here are some tricks to try on your favourite cookie recipes to make them thinner:

• Cream the butter and sugar and eggs well when you first begin to make your cookie dough—more air can cause the cookies to expand in the oven as they heat up, and then they may collapse more.
• Warm your cookie dough—even just 10–20 minutes out of the refrigerator can warm the cookie dough enough to promote spreading for some cookie recipes! This is the first step I would take if a cookie dough is cold (or frozen) and not spreading enough.
• Preheat your oven for at least 20–30 minutes to ensure it's hot and the temperature is more stable. Placing your cookies in the oven too early can cause the edges to set too fast as the temperature may spike more often.
• Increase the sugar in your dough recipe—sometimes adding as little as 50 grams (¼ cup) of sugar to a cookie dough recipe will increase the spread and lead to thinner cookies
• Decrease the flour in your recipe—sometimes just 30–60 grams (¼–½ cup) less flour can create thinner cookies
• Switch from baking by volume to baking by weight, especially when it comes to flour! Get a kitchen scale if you don't already own one and this baking ingredient conversion chart to help you convert your recipes quickly and easily.
• Increase the baking soda—if your cookie dough has no baking soda (or very little), consider increasing the baking soda slightly. For example, instead of using 1.25 mL (¼ teaspoon) of baking soda in your dough, try using 2.5 mL (½ teaspoon) instead and see the impact it has on the baked cookies.
• Bake cookies at a lower oven temperature—I like thick, chewy drop cookies, so I tend to bake most of my drop cookies at 375 °F or even 400 °F. This is a personal preference, but if you like the taste of your cookie recipe, but the cookies are too thick, try baking them at a lower temperature and see if you get thinner cookies.
• Bake cookies on a parchment-lined aluminum sheet pan
• Flatten mounds of cookie dough before baking—leave the scoops of cookie dough as is to ensure they don't melt too fast.

Unfortunately, you can't fix the problem after the fact if you've baked a cookie recipe and the cookies didn't spread out enough as they baked. The edges have set and there's no going back. If they taste good nonetheless, you can still eat and enjoy them, or chop them up and add them to a batch of cookie ice cream. I highly recommend investing in a small eighth-sheet pan so that you can bake one test cookie to verify how your cookie dough behaves when it's baked.

Though it's hard to make adjustments to a mixed dough, it is possible. I have added more sugar to mixed cookie dough to promote spreading and it has worked. It's not ideal and it's difficult to mix certain ingredients into cookie dough evenly, but it is possible if you are faced with a dough that isn't baking the way you want it to!

The post Thick Cookies And Reasons Cookies Don't Spread appeared first on The Bake School.

Reasons a cookie spreads while baking

A little spread is a good thing and with many recipes that's normal. But if you are making cutout cookies, like classic gingerbread cutout cookies or cut-out sugar cookies that you will be decorating with royal icing, you need them to hold their shape as they bake! Even with drop cookies, it can be a real problem if they spread out too thin. They become too delicate to even pick up in some cases or multiple cookies will melt into one.

If you find your cookies spread too much, here are the main reasons why:

• too much air in cookie dough
• too much sugar/butter in recipe
• not enough flour
• too much baking soda
• dough is too warm
• the fat used has a lower melting point
• the oven is not hot enough
• the bakeware is insulating or a poor heat conductor
• silicone baking mat was used

Too much air in the cookie dough

In cake recipes, you usually want to incorporate air into the cake batter when you cream the butter and the sugar. It's the first step in most cake recipes and often you will take at least 5 minutes to do this simple step because you are trying to beat in air and trap it into the soft, but not too soft, butter.

While air helps cakes, making them less dense and more fluffy, too much air in a cookie can be problematic: the air bubbles will expand in the oven and will cause your cookies to spread and lose their shape. Air in cookie dough can also lead to bubbles that might look like lumps in a baked cookie, like shortbread and cut-out sugar cookies.

Too much sugar and/or butter

When butter melts as the cookies bake, the cookies will spread, especially if the structure and outer edges of the cookies haven't dried and set yet. Too much butter will promote spread and the loss of shape.

Too much sugar is also problematic in most cookies recipes and actually promotes spread when the sugar absorbs moisture and liquifies, causing cookies to thin out in the oven.

Remember that when we refer to "too much" of an ingredient, we are finding that the recipe's ingredient ratios are off or unbalanced, and that there's too much butter or sugar relative to the flour, for example.

Not enough flour

I see this a lot: chocolate chip cookies that spread out and become thin and crispy as they bake. More often than not, it's a sign there isn't enough flour in the recipe as compared to the amount of butter, sugar, and eggs.

Flour is an important ingredient that binds all the other ingredients together. It absorbs moisture and gives baked goods structure. Not enough flour, compared to the butter and sugar, means your cookies will spread out and may even merge into one if there isn't enough space between them!

If your baked cookies are too thin or lacy, you probably need to add more flour!

Too much baking soda

In some recipes, baking soda will increase the pH of the cookie dough, so much so that it might actually increase cookie spread by weakening the gluten network that helps hold the cookie dough together.

The dough could be too warm or too soft

The dough could also be too warm or too soft because your butter was warm when you mixed it or because the friction of the beaters of your mixer against the bowl heated up the dough.

The type of fat

The melting point of butter is 35 ºC (95° F), whereas the melting point of shortening is 47ºC (117ºF). This means that butter will melt at a lower temperature than shortening, meaning cookie dough made with butter will spread faster than cookies made with shortening. Cookies with shortening are usually thicker than cookies made with butter because the outer edges have time to dry out and set before the fat has a chance to completely melt.

Oven temperature too low

If your oven isn't hot enough, the cookie dough will melt and spread out faster than the edges set. This will lead to thinner cookies that are more spread out. Just baking at 25 °F lower temperature can cause this to happen.

Bakeware material

If you bake with insulated cookie sheets or cookie sheets that are made of a metal that is a less good heat conductor, you will notice your cookies spread too much before the edges set. Again this is because the dough will "feel" a lower temperature that causes the fats and sugar to melt before the edges dry out and stiffen. You will end up with thinner cookies.

Baking cookies on silicone baking mats

Using silicone baking mats instead of parchment paper may cause your cookies to spread. Silicone is not a good heat conductor, and as mentioned above, this means the mounds of cookie dough won't feel the temperature of the oven on the bottom, which will lead to the bases spreading before the edges set.

Reasons why cookies don't spread enough in the oven

Sometimes you want a cookie to spread, at least a little, but they don't and end up looking more like a big lump or even like a round scone and not a proper cookie. There are many reasons for this:

• Not enough egg (or wet ingredients)
• Not enough butter/sugar
• Not enough baking soda
• Too much flour
• Oven too hot

Not enough egg

Egg is an emulsifier, but it's also a source of moisture and water in recipes, which turns to steam in the oven, which helps baked goods puff and spread. Not enough moisture and not enough egg means your scoops of cookie dough won't budge as they bake, which can be problematic.

Not enough butter and/or sugar

Both sugar and butter cause cookies to spread and not enough of either of these will lead to a dry cookie dough that won't spread enough in the oven. You may have seen this in cookie recipes with less sugar and less fat, they tend to look more lumpy, like the shape of the scoop of dough didn't soften at all in the oven. That's probably a lack of sugar and fat at play.

Not enough chemical leaveners

Remember that chemical leaveners, specifically baking soda and baking powder, are essential ingredients that help your baked goods rise. You'd expect that without them, a cookie might spread out instead of puffing up. And that's definitely true in some cases, but it depends on the recipe.

Too much flour or cookie dough is too dry

If you overshoot the flour and add too much to a cookie dough, the dough may end up so dry that the melting butter in the heat in the oven isn't enough to get the cookies to spread.

You might also have trouble scooping the dough if you add too much flour because there aren't enough binding ingredients to hold the dough together.

Oven temperature too high

The higher the oven temperature, the faster the edges of your cookies will set in the oven. And the faster the edges set, the less they spread. Faster setting edges may also lead to the surface of the cookie cracking as it dries out.

How to control and prevent cookie spread in the oven

There are small changes in your technique and your recipe that you can make today to control the spread of your next batch of cookies in the oven.

1. Incorporate less air in the cookie dough: air pockets will expand when the cookie dough bakes, which will lead to spread. Incorporate less air will lead to a more stable cookie dough that spreads less. Save all that whipping for when you make a warm milk sponge cake or other fluffy baked goods.
2. Use a little less sugar in the cookie dough: sugar actually promotes spread because it's hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs humidity and water. When sugar liquifies, the dough will become softer, leading to cookie dough spread when baked. Sometimes using just a little less sugar in a recipe can help with spread.
   1. On that note, remember to properly measure out baking ingredients, preferably using a kitchen scale!
3. Consider baking with a fat that has a higher melting point, or combining butter and shortening to get the best of both worlds: good flavour and higher melting point
4. Adjust chemical leaveners in your recipe to control how much (or how little) cookies spread when baked.
5. Add more flour to a cookie recipe to reduce spreading: if your cookie dough is too soft, too buttery, or too wet, it's likely your cookies will spread when they bake. I tend to add a little more flour in my chewy chocolate chip cookies to reduce spreading because I prefer thick, chewy chocolate chip cookies. Want a thinner cookie? Add less flour.
6. Chill the cookie dough well: cold cookie dough means the butter in the dough is cold, solid and hard. It takes more energy to melt the butter when it's cold, than when the cookie dough (and the butter) is at room temperature. Cold dough will take longer to spread in the oven, which means the surface of the cookie may set and dry out faster than the dough spreads, leading to a tighter, rounder cookie that is thicker. This is true for rolled cookies that are cut out with cookie cutters and pie dough as well!
7. Bake cookies at a higher temperature and they will spread less

Sometimes you want a cookie to spread and sometimes you don't. Take the time to analyze your recipes so that you can predict the results and troubleshoot when your cookies don't turn out the way you want them to.

To prevent cookies from spreading you have options, like baking at a higher temperature, chilling the cookie dough thoroughly, increasing the amount of flour in the recipe, reducing the sugar slightly, playing with the amount of egg in the recipe, changing the fat used, and many more!

The post Why chill cookie dough and other techniques to stop cookies from spreading appeared first on The Bake School.

Reasons cookies are browning too quickly and raw in the middle

Your cookies might be browning too quickly because of:

• the colour and material of your sheet pans: bakeware made of darker materials will absorb more heat and depending on the metal, some are better heat conductors.
• your oven: it might not be preheating to the set temperature and might be going way above that or you are setting your oven to a very high temperature, too high for your cookies
• oven rack position: if you are baking your cookies on the bottom rack of the oven, they might have too much heat directed to the bottom
• too much baking soda can promote Maillard browning by increasing the pH of cookie dough

Solutions

If you are having trouble baking cookies that are golden brown on the outside and perfectly baked, consider making the following adjustments:

• get an oven thermometer to double check the temperature of your oven (leave it hanging in your oven at all times so you can get to know your oven a little better)
• double check that both heating elements of your oven are working. If one is broken, the other will compensate and this will definitely mean baked goods burn on one side.
• drop the temperature of your oven by 25 ºF if your cookie sheets are a dark material or if your cookies are very old and have stains and baked on gunk that is verging on black.
• switch your oven rack to the middle position and place your sheet pan of cookies on the middle rack to bake them more evenly
• if your sheet pans are old, very stained, and have burnt-on dark spots, figure out a way to clean them if they are, or upgrade to new cookie sheets
  • another option for this one is to invest in parchment paper or better yet, a silicone baking mat like a Silpat. Silicone is an insulator and reduces browning of cookies, slowing it down significantly, which is exactly what you need to solve this problem. Note that these mats come in different sizes and you should invest in the right size to fit your pans as you can't cut them without damaging them.
• double check your recipe to make sure it’s not overloaded with baking soda

Don't despair if your cookies end up burned on the bottom and raw in the middle. Learn from it! Sometimes just a small adjustment to your technique or your equipment can have a big impact.

The post Why cookies end up very dark on the bottom and completely raw in the middle appeared first on The Bake School.

My oven racks' default positions are the middle and bottom racks. Most of the recipes I bake use these positions. But for specific recipes, I may use one or the other, and they cannot be used interchangeably.

Basic oven rack positions

Most ovens have 5 or 6 rack levels and each serves a different purpose.

• The top rack is for broiling. It's the closest to the top heating element of your oven. When you set your oven to the "broil" setting (as opposed to the "bake" setting), only the top element heats up and the heat of the oven is concentrated towards the top of the oven. When you want to brown the top of a casserole, the cheese on top of a lasagna, or caramelize the sugar layer on top of crème brûlée in the oven, you will use the top rack for these specific baking tasks.
• The middle racks are for even baking. You likely have 3 middle racksThese racks are evenly spaced and approximately halfway between the top and bottom heating element. You would use the middle racks when you set your oven to "bake" for baked goods that you want to feel an even heat (not too hot on top, and not too hot on the bottom).
• The bottom rack is for recipes that require more directed heat on the bottom. Any baked goods that you have trouble baking through on the bottom specifically should be baked on the bottom rack, which will benefit from the heat of the bottom element concentrated on the bottom of the baking pan.

What to bake at each position

1. Top oven rack: you will use the top rack for these specific baking tasks:
   1. To brown the top of a casserole or the cheese on top of a lasagna or a gratin
   2. To caramelize the sugar layer on top of crème brûlée in the oven.
2. Middle racks: these are especially useful for cakes and cookies. These require even heat, when you don't want heat concentrated on top or on bottom of the baked goods.
3. Bottom rack: it's best to bake pies on the bottom rack. Pie filling is quite insulating and prevents the bottom crust from cooking without more heat directed to the bottom of the pan. Therefore baking and browning the bottom crust of a fruit pie can be very difficult. You need more heat directed to the bottom crust to help it cook, which is why using the bottom rack is your best best!

Utilizing multiple rack levels

As you become a more skilled baker, you will likely start to transition to using different racks for different stages of baking:

• You may start a pie on the bottom rack to ensure the crust gets a good amount of heat early on, then you may slide your pie to the middle rack to finish heating the pie all the way through.
• You may begin to bake casseroles on the middle shelf, then in the last 10 minutes, move the pan to the top rack to broil, creating a delicious golden-brown top that you would never achieve on the middle rack.

Baking on two racks simultaneously

You might find yourself in a situation where you have two sheet pans of cookies to bake at once. But technically, there's only one true middle rack in your oven. You have two choices:

1. Bake the two pans separately on the middle rack, one at a time. When the first is done baking, take it out and slide the second pan in.
2. Bake both pans at the same time, using the first and third middle rack positions, leaving the true middle rack empty.

If you choose to bake multiple sheet pans of cookies or layers of cake at the same time, make sure to rotate and swap the pans partway through the baking time to ensure that they bake evenly.

How to know which rack to use

If you are ever unsure of which oven rack position to use (or if the recipe doesn't specify), ask yourself a few questions to establish what your goal is:

1. Do I want to caramelize the top of something? Brown cheese? Crisp up the top? Use the top oven rack position in conjunction with the broil setting!
2. Am I worried the bottom of my baked goods won't bake properly? Use the bottom oven rack in conjunction with the bake setting!
3. Do I want an even bake throughout? Use the middle oven rack position in conjunction with the bake setting.

Once you know where you are headed, you can adjust your baking rack positions accordingly and utilize your oven's full potential.

Here's a rundown of recipe categories and which oven rack to bake them on:

• cookies: middle oven rack
• cakes: middle oven rack
• scones: middle oven rack
• bread: middle oven rack
• pie: bottom oven rack with a sheet pan under the pie plate to catch drips
• fruit crisps and crumbles: middle oven rack with a sheet pan under the baking dish to catch drips

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