The Best Tips That Will Upgrade your Baking Skills

Baking at home can be incredibly rewarding, but taking your skills to the next level requires more than just skimming through a recipe. Whether you’re an amateur baker looking to perfect your craft or a seasoned home cook aiming to elevate your baked goods, these 15 pro tips will help you transform your baking into something truly extraordinary. From mastering the science behind your ingredients to refining your technique and presentation, these tips will guide you on the journey from home baker to professional-level pastry chef.

Read the Whole Recipe

All pastry chefs know how important it is to read through and understand the entire recipe before starting a baking project. Don’t just skim the ingredients or quickly look at the baking time; actually read the whole thing! You do not want to start baking and then realize you are missing an ingredient, don’t have the correct pan, or didn’t know about the 5-hour chilling time required to make a dessert. 

Knowing exactly what you are baking and how to do it mentally prepares you for the recipe. Baking surprises are never good! Read the whole recipe, and then you will indeed be ready to start baking. 

Buy The Good Ingredients

You will be amazed how high-quality ingredients can make a dessert so much better. When you buy the cheap flour or the cheap butter, you might save a few cents, but your pastries will suffer. Ingredients cost less for a reason! They are not as flavorful as the expensive stuff and often have completely different textures.

For example, high-end flour is fluffy, soft, and very finely ground, while cheap flour is dense, heavy, and has larger particles. You can guess which one will make better pastries! Spend a little bit of extra money on the good ingredients. Invest in your pastries! 

Preheat Your Oven

We cannot stress this enough! You need to give your oven plenty of time to heat up. The average oven takes about 15 minutes to reach the correct temperature.

Trying to bake in an oven that is not pre-heated will lead to disaster. Professional chefs always turn the oven on as soon as they enter the kitchen. You need to do this, too! 

Sift The Dry Ingredients

Lots of recipes ask you to sift the dry ingredients together, but many of us are guilty of skipping this step. Why dirty another bowl when you don’t have to?! But sifting really is essential. Flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, and pretty much all dry ingredients have a tendency to clump. You don’t want small balls of baking soda in your cake or chunks of cocoa powder in your tiramisu!

Sifting helps fluff up the dry ingredients and break up any pieces that would otherwise ruin your desserts. Sifting takes about 20 seconds, so just do it! You will notice the difference. 

Dust With Cocoa Powder

If you need to roll out cookie dough or pie crust, don’t dust your work surface with flour. Use cocoa powder instead! This is a little pastry chef secret that will help give your sweets an exciting flavor that no one will be able to pinpoint.

Cocoa powder works like flour to prevent dough from sticking as you roll, so you don’t have to worry about that! So sprinkle a little cocoa on the counter, roll out your dough, and feel like a pro as you do it. 

Add a Crumb Coat

When making a layer cake, you absolutely must add a crumb coat of frosting. A crumb coat is a very thin layer of frosting that you put on the outside of the cake after you assemble the layers.

Coating your layered cake with a little bit of frosting will help hold the cake together and also trap all the crumbs in the frosting. Chill the cake after adding the crumb coat so that it gets nice and firm. Once the cake is cold, it will be extremely easy to add the final, pretty layer of frosting. There will be no cake crumbs showing, and the cake will be firm and not move around when you add the pretty icing. 

Keep Your Butter Out

All pastry chefs keep a few pounds of butter on their counter at room temperature. Almost all baking recipes that use butter ask for “softened butter”. Rather than microwaving cold butter (which most often makes it melt), simply keep a pound of butter on your counter at all times.

Room-temperature butter is the perfect texture for baking. It will be soft and ready to blend into the perfectly!

This is a pro tip that will transform your baked goods!

Use a Scale

Baking is a true science! You need to weigh your ingredients to truly measure them correctly. Using cups and teaspoons is fine, but it will never be as accurate as using a kitchen scale.

One person scoops and measures a cup of flour very differently from another. They can be ounces apart! Measuring your ingredients with a scale ensures accuracy and baking perfection. 

Use a Scoop

A spring-loaded ice cream scoop is the perfect way to portion cookie dough and batter easily. Professional pastry chefs use scoops to make their cookies all the same size and to scoop the perfect amount of cupcake batter into pretty paper liners.

Spring-loaded scoops are the best because you can simply “click” the dough out of the scoop! They come in a variety of sizes, but a standard 2-ounce scoop is best for cookies and also the right size for standard-sized cupcakes. 

Scrape the Bowl

Pretty much every baking recipe out there tells you to scrape the sides of the bowl after you add every ingredient. You need to do this! Ingredients tend to stick to the sides of the mixing bowl and a paddle attachment or electric mixer might not blend everything together evenly.

It is essential to stop and use a rubber spatula to scrape everything off the sides and incorporate it into the batter. 

Keep it Clean

Keep your workstation clean as you bake. A clean kitchen equals a clean mind, allowing you to focus on your baking rather than the mess. Look at any professional kitchen, and you will immediately notice that it is spotless! Organizing is just as crucial to baking as ingredients!

Don’t Rush!

Baking is an actual science. The way ingredients interact and turn into stunning desserts is all a matter of chemical reactions. If a recipe says to “chill overnight” or “rest for an hour”, follow the directions! There is a reason behind the wait time, and you do not want to rush the recipe. Good desserts are worth the wait!

Use Silicone Mats

Silicone mats are one of the best ways to bake perfect cookies. The bottoms of your cookies will never burn again or stick to the pan. Plus silicone mats are reusable. You can use them thousands of times, making them well worth the investment. They are straightforward to wipe and clean. Get a set with mats of a few different sizes, so you have one for every pan in your kitchen.

Room Temperature Eggs

Adding cold eggs to a cookie dough or to a cake batter can be a disaster. The cold eggs can solidify the butter and completely change the texture of your batter. This can honestly change your whole dessert!

Take your eggs out of the fridge at the beginning of the baking process so they have time to warm up. Eggs will be safe at room temperature for several hours, so you don’t have to worry!