baking

Pastry has never been my forté. I can put together a batch of chocolate chip cookies or one-bowl blondies pretty well, but I have had a series of disasters with cakes, pies, and other sweets that made me trepidatious of the whole endevaor. Two Thanksgivings ago, I overfilled a cake pan with batter and ended up with an overflow situation and a lot of burned cake bits at the bottom of the oven.

You might think about milk powder as something that's mostly for baby formula or survivalists. After all, it is exactly what it sounds like: regular old cow milk that's been dehydrated. Turning milk from a liquid to a solid has all kinds of advantages. Milk powder is shelf-stable, and it take up a lot less room than a regular gallon of milk. And it turns out that milk powder is an incredibly useful ingredient to have in your pantry, particularly if you're a baker. 

Getting into baking sourdough lands somewhere between adopting a puppy and deciding to start a garden on the commitment scale. Just ask Noam Grossman of Upside Pizza, who uses a sourdough starter rather than commercial yeast, for all of the pizza dough in the shop. Figuring out how to feed the starter so that it would be at its peak during the hours when they needed in was a process of trial and error, with a lot of focus on the temperature of the water and the temperature of the room that the starter was in.

It seems as though the cupcake craze is here to stay. Every year we keep finding out the “next” kale, or kimchee, or cauliflower carb, but for the past decade or so the “new” cupcakes are, well, cupcakes.

Baking, when you're avoiding gluten, can be a tricky proposition. There are plenty of recipes out there for flourless chocolate cake or gluten-free stuffing, but when it comes to recreating favorites like cake, bread, or cookies, you can run into trouble. "Lots of gluten-free bread and buns end up being really dry," said Matt Aita, the executive chef of gluten-free restaurant mini-chain The Litte Beet Table.

Once upon a time, buying a bag of flour was a relatively simple endeavor. You'd pick out whichever brand of snowy white all-purpose flour you’d pledged loyalty to. Maybe you’d put a bag of cake flour or bread flour in your cart too, if you were an avid baker.

Those days are gone.

For the most passionate cake, cookie, and bread enthusiasts of the world, there’s nothing more terrifying than finding out you—or someone you love to bake for—can no longer eat the gluten that is key to those dishes. 

However, there’s absolutely no reason gluten intolerance should prevent you from digging into the baked goods you know and love, especially now that gluten-free alternatives to the standard baking ingredients are readily available in every grocery store.

Recently I had an opportunity to spend some time in Bath, England. The charming town, famous for its ancient Roman baths and for being a vacation destination for Jane Austen, among others, has some foods that they have claimed as their own since the 1700s.

Today in great news we didn’t know we needed: Emma Bunton, aka Baby Spice, is set to co-host the holiday edition of The Great American Baking Show.

The American version of The Great British Bake Off will follow competitors as they complete a series of holiday-themed baking challenges. Tensions run high, as only one contestant will be crowned America's Best Amateur Baker.