Identifying The Most Common Baking Errors

Home baking can be an extremely rewarding pastime, turning simple ingredients into wonderful cakes, biscuits, breads and other baked goods.
Yet even with the easiest recipes, the results can sometimes be disappointing. Here are a few hint, tips and tricks to avoid popular baking complications.
There are a few fundamental Baker's basics to grasp. You don't need to be a master baker to make best cakes & baked goods, with care and patience and a little know-how about the basic rules, there is no legitimate reason why you should not attain wonderful results every time.
He first essential skill is to read the recipe diligently just before you start and try to be aware of the steps involved. A little added preparation, such as assembling together all the ingredients and utensils required. Let ingredients such as eggs and butter return to room temperature a good half an hour prior to using them, with the exception of pastry recipes where butter needs to remain chilly.
Preparation.
For cakes, preheat your oven to the temperature called for in the recipe prior to starting work on the ingredients. When making bread however, you wont need to preheat the oven until the first rise of the dough is finished.
Oven temperature is essential to successful baking. While the temperature settings on most ovens are sort of accurate, it would be a good idea to check your oven with a separate oven thermometer obtainable at most kitchenware shops. Do this on a regular basis to ensure consistent results.
Use the correct tin size when ever possible. If a cake recipe calls for a 6 inch tin, but you only have an 8 inch tin available, then the resulting cake will be slimmer and take less time to cook, so either you need to increase the measurements of the ingredients, or lessen the cooking time.
Measuring.
A good set of scales is essential for accurately measuring the ingredients. Baking is more like a science than an art, so using improper or vague measurements will more often than no result in disaster. Get yourself a quality set of scales, measuring jugs and spoons. If these have both imperial and metric measurement marks you will be able to conveniently adhere to recipe measurements from anywhere in the world, otherwise you'll need a conversion table to work out pounds vs grams or pints vs liters every time you use a new recipe.
What can go awry.
Baking is quite an exact art. Even the experienced bakers who look like they are throwing in ingredients by the mug or hand full comprehend that the ratio needs to be maintained.
Many problems occur when the oven is too hot or too cold. Having the oven too high will result in the surface layer of the bread or cake becoming dark or burnt before the inside is cooked properly. An extremely hot oven will kill off yeast in bread mixture prior to the loaf rising, resulting in a dense house brick instead of a light fluffy loaf. Having your oven too high will cause cakes to "dome" and burn instead of rising uniformly.
On the other end of the scale, if your oven is too low, bread will fail to rise adequately and cakes are likely to remain pale and will most likely sag in the midsection.
Tins need to be greased properly to prevent mixture from sticking & large cakes should be protected by one or two layers of greaseproof paper to prevent the outer layer from overcooking.
Cakes with a domed top indicate that the mixture may not have been beaten enough or that the oven was too hot or that the cake was placed too high in the oven. It may also be a sign that the mixture wasn't quite right. Maybe a little dry or too much raising agent.
Cakes with a sunken center suggest that they weren't baked long enough or the oven was too low, or that you were just a little too curious and opened the oven door too early in the cooking process.
Cakes with a damp or doughy center are a sign of the mixture being too wet with too much liquid and not enough flour, or that the oven was too hot.
Bread that is dense or doughy indicates not enough yeast or that the water used wasn't warm enough to activate the yeast, or was too hot and had killed off the yeast. The bread dough may have been too wet, or the dough was not given enough time to rise or that not enough effort was used in the kneading process. Dense bread may also be an indication of an incorrect oven temperature .
If your bread overflows the tin or the top cracks and burns you may have used too much yeast or the dough was allowed to rise for too long.
So all in all, baking can be rewarding process as long as you stick to the basics.

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