CAKES   CRAFTS          WORLD

- Use room-temperature ingredients 

- Use grams rather than cups

- Take your time to fully complete each step

- Let it cool completely unless you shouldn't

- Use substitutions at your own risk 

- Butter and flour the pans generously

- Always read the recipe before you do anything

- Melted butter is NOT the same as softened butter

- A pinch is three fingers, not two

- Brush phyllo pastry with egg wash to give a nice golden sheen 

- Cooking is art but baking is chemistry. Basically, if you add a few herbs in cooking it doesn't really matter. However, if you add stuff to the mixture in baking, it will impact the final result. 

- Want to make a neat pattern on your cakes with sprinkles? Just use a cookie cutter.       Place it on your cake and sprinkle some hundreds and thousands inside. 

- Place your piping bag in a glass first then fill up.

- Place your cold eggs in warm water to put them at room temperature.

- Use your large eggshell to get small pieces out of the mixture.

- Don't over mix your batter; always follow the instructions

- A perfectly baked cake will spring back when pressed in the middle

- When using an electric hand mixer, spin the bowl as well as moving it

- DO NOT microwave butter 

- When trying to get cold butter to come to room temperature, cut it into smaller chunks so it will warm up quicker.

- Room temperature ingredients mix better than cold ingredients. Try to get your cold ingredients as close to room temperature as you can before mixing your cake batter.

- This one might go without saying, but don’t open your oven a hundred times to check the cake. You’ll let out too much heat, which will hurt your baking time and could cause the cake to sink.

- When mixing up your cake batter, don’t skip out on scraping down the bowl. It’s important to get any random bits of butter or flour incorporated into the batter. If you’ve got a stand-up mixer, also scrap the bottom. Sometimes the beater doesn’t reach areas toward the bottom.

- Don’t slam the oven door or otherwise jostle the cake inside. That’s a good way to get the cake to sink.

- Don’t over-beat a scratch cake batter. The texture of your cake will come out all wrong. It can be super dense, it could fall, it could have gluey streaks and even tunnels in it. You can beat a cake box mix batter longer, but not a scratch cake

- Once your cake is baked, cool them inside the pan and on a rack for only about ten minutes (a bit longer for large or bundt cakes). After ten minutes, turn them out of their pans to cool on the rack completely. If you let them sit too long in their pans, you could have trouble getting them out later

- If you want you can freeze your baked cakes. If you do it the right way, you won’t get freezer burn and no one will ever know they’ve been frozen

- Stop worrying about getting flat tops on your baked cakes. There are a ton of tricks out there to get them to bake with flat tops, but I don’t like messing with the texture o a cake. Let the cake layers bake up normally and then just use a leveler to cut off the dome. You don’t need a fancy leveler either. Just use a large knife.

- Don't forget to preheat the oven. Make sure it’s fully preheated before you get that cake in there.

- Make sure to check your baking soda and baking powder. They’re not good indefinitely. Write the dates on your containers when you open them the first time

- Don’t adjust the cake recipe (unless you're really experienced, or feeling lucky). You don’t want to make adjustments to the ingredients or you could throw off the ratios and you don’t want to change the mixing method because you could get a totally different texture than you expected.

- Prepare your pans well, by greasing and flouring them, so you don’t waste time making the perfect cake, only to have it get stuck in the pan.

- Coat any add-ins to your cupcake mixture with flour so that they don't sink to the bottom

- Forgot to let your butter out at room temperature? Don't worry! simply heat a tall glass with hot water and place the glass on top of the butter! EASY!