The Art of Baking

Baking is quite a concise art, so knowing some of the intricacies will help ensure you avoid wasting valuable time on making muffins and cakes that don't quite reach the grade.  Once you know the basics, experiment with new flavour combinations and highlight these 'new creations' to your customers.

High Grade

Makes strong dough.  Suitable for bread and pastry, but gives cakes a coarse, tough texture.

Plain

Better choice for a light, crumbly texture, as is desired in cakes and muffins.

All-purpose

Suitable for all types of cooking.

Self-raising

Plain flour mixed with baking powder.  This product will lose its potency, so best to use within three months.  A substitute for self-raising flour is plain flour (1 cup) and baking powder (1½ tsp).

Wholemeal

Consists of the whole of the wheat grain.  Suitable for some baked products, giving them more 'body'.  A proportion of white flour in a standard recipe may be substituted with wholemeal flour or other grain flour.  Stone-ground flour may have better flavour than roller-milled, since the slow grinding of the stones doesn't overheat and destroy the vitamins in the wheat.  However, stone-ground flour doesn't keep as well and so probably needs to be used up within one month.

Gluten-free

This means no wheat, rye, barley, oats, or malt is present in the bakery product and it must contain no detectable levels of gluten (a protein in cereals).  Alternatives include rice flour and soy flour.

Preparation

Accurately measure the ingredients and follow the mixing instructions.  For example, some muffin recipes require that the muffin batter be mixed only enough to just combine ingredients.  Over-mixing produces tough muffins.
Once wet and dry ingredients are combined, put mix quickly into tins to cook because the raising agents will have already started to work.

Baking

Ovens vary in their temperatures, so be prepared to adjust the cooking temperature and time.  If the temperature is too hot, the outside of the cake will be baked before the inside.  The overall texture will be tough.  If too cool, the cake will be flat, coarse and uneven.

Finished product

Cool 15 minutes, then loosen around the sides and turn out onto a cake rack.  If left in the tin to cool completely, it will be difficult to remove and soggy.
Store the baked products in a clean, cool place where they won't dry out or go mouldy.  The freezing of baked goods for later use offers benefits of convenience.  However, freeze the products soon after they have been made and allowed to cool.  It is not recommended to freeze bakery products that have been on display for sale.