All-New Cake Mix Doctor - Anne Byrn [5]
Easiest Tricks in the Book
A little trial and error (and learning from your suggestions) has produced this list of baking essentials. What I know now that I didn’t know then . . .
1. Most of my cakes call for vegetable oil. But if they call for butter, use unsalted butter in the cake and lightly salted butter in the frosting.
2. For everyday recipes, Nestlé semisweet chocolate chips are great. Upgrade to Ghirardelli bittersweet or other premium chips if you are making a ganache frosting for a special occasion.
3. If you don’t grease the side of layer pans, you’ll have a slightly taller cake.
4. Paint Bundts and decorative pans with vegetable shortening (Crisco), then dust them with flour and your cakes will not stick to the pan.
5. The refrigerator is your friend. Cool layers there in a hurry. Let a cake frosted with cream cheese frosting set before wrapping it for storage or travel.
6. You can easily reduce the oil in a fruit-based cake by just upping the fruit a bit and decreasing the oil by the same amount.
7. Instead of an 8-ounce package of cream cheese and a stick of butter, use half the cream cheese to reduce fat and heaviness.
8. Use half a package of instant pudding mix to prevent cakes from shrinking as they cool.
9. Even if the package directions call for it, you can use some other liquid instead of water—milk, buttermilk, orange juice, or brewed coffee (especially in brownies).
10. If the layer, Bundt, or sheet cake recipe calls for chocolate chips and you’re worried that they might sink to the bottom as the cake bakes, use miniature chips.
11. Buttermilk, plain yogurt, and sour cream are amazingly interchangeable in recipes. If the recipe calls for one of these, you can easily use another one or a little bit of two to make up for what’s in the recipe. When substituting buttermilk for milk or water, use slightly more buttermilk, as it tends to be thick.
12. Keep evaporated milk in your pantry. You can substitute it for heavy cream in recipes where the cream is either baked in the batter or where it is intensely flavored with coffee, which will take away the “canned” taste.
13. Keep chopped nuts and grated citrus zest in your freezer. This way they are at your fingertips when you need them.
14. You can turn a yellow cake mix into a spice mix by adding one teaspoon of cinnamon, a half teaspoon of allspice, and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg.
15. Don’t throw away a cake that falls, cracks, or overbakes. Crumble it into wine glasses, drizzle Kahlúa or rum over it, and add a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
How to Have Your Cake and Be Healthy, Too
I’m often asked how it is that my career revolves around cake baking and yet I am not fat. I guess I have learned how to live with my work—enjoy it but don’t let it get the best of me. Honestly, I’ve never fancied doing without the foods I love, like chocolate cake, because whenever I’ve tried, I just think more about them. That does not mean I’ve never dieted, because I often did in my teens, twenties, and not too long ago, after returning from Italy ten pounds heavier. But when faced with the choice of dieting or not to stay trim, I would rather eat sensibly and moderately and get exercise day-to-day so I can have my chocolate cake.
There should be a place in our lives for cake, for goodness sake. Cake plays a part in celebrations, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, big events. It’s a joyous food and too much fun to do without. So what I do is have one reasonable slice, not two. If I have leftover cake in the house, I either give it to friends to take home with them, send it to the office with my husband, or freeze it for future meals. If a chocolate cake sits on my kitchen counter, I will carve off a slice two or three times a day, so my solution is to simply get it out of my sight—which is really hard during recipe testing for a new book. During times like these I just plan on eating more cake than usual, getting more exercise than usual—running—and cutting back on other carbs