Baking Recipes

Best Baking Recipes From Scratch

Discover how to make delicious fresh bread, biscuits/cookies, muffins and cakes in your own kitchen using our baking recipes from scratch.
Our collection contains a lot of easy baking recipes for beginners, so please explore.

There is nothing like the smell of fresh baking for your family to enjoy and make your make guests feel at home.

Tips For Baking

Here are 10 tips for baking that will help you get perfect results.

1. Always Have the Correct Butter Consistency;
   Butter is the starting point for the majority of baked goods, so it’s important to have it prepped as the recipe suggests.
   The temperature of butter can dramatically affect the texture of baked goods.
   There are three different consistencies of butter that baking recipes typically call for: softened, chilled (or frozen like in scones), and melted.

   Most recipes calling for butter call for room temperature/softened butter.

   Room temperature butter is actually cool to touch, not warm.
   When you press it, your finger will make an indent.
   Your finger won’t sink down into the butter, nor will your finger slide all around.

   To get that perfect consistency and temperature, leave butter out on the benchtop for around 1 hour prior to beginning your recipe.

   Chilled butter is butter that has been well chilled in the refrigerator or freezer so that it does not melt during mixing.
   This helps create flaky pockets in recipes for example pie crust and scones.

   Unless otherwise noted, melted butter should be liquified and lukewarm.
   If melted butter is too hot, it can cook the eggs in your batter.

2. Room Temperature is vital;
   Speaking of temperature, if a recipe calls for room temperature eggs or any dairy ingredients such as milk cream or yoghurt, make sure you follow suit.
   Room temperature ingredients emulsify much easier into batter, which creates a uniform texture throughout your baked good.

   Think of cold, hard butter. It’s impossible to cream cold butter into a soft consistency necessary for some recipes.
   Same goes for eggs, they add much more volume to the batter when they’re at room temperature.

3. Read the Recipe Before Beginning;
   I’ve had a complete recipe disaster because I didn’t realise a certain step was coming up.
   Reading ahead will help you know the how, why, where, and when of what you are about to do.

   It will take you 1-5 minutes and could save you from wasting your ingredients, time and money on a failed recipe.

4. Always Have Ingredients Prepped;
   Measure your ingredients before starting a recipe. Read through the ingredients, then get them prepared on your bench-top.

   There’s very little room for error when you begin recipes this way; you’re not scrambling and rushing during the recipe process.

   And avoid making ingredient substitutions. Use real butter and not margarine unless the recipe tells you to.
   Remember, baking is chemistry.
   Make the recipe as written first then if you feel confident, make substitutions as you see fit.

5. Learn How to Measure;
   This is actually one of the most important baking tips on this page.
   As you know, baking is science. Excellent baking requires precise ratios, proven techniques, and well-tested recipes.
   Unlike cooking, you can’t just bake something by throwing some ingredients together, mess it up, then eat it anyway.

   One of the most crucial baking tips is measuring ingredients properly.

   Problems are common if measurements are incorrect. Having a firm grasp of measuring techniques is essential.

   Measure dry ingredients in measuring cups or spoons because these are specially designed for dry ingredients.
   Spoon and level (aka “spoon and sweep”) your dry ingredients.
   This means that you should use a spoon to fill the cup and level it off.
   This is especially important with flour.
   Scooping flour (or any dry ingredient) packs that ingredient down and you could be left with up to 150% more than what’s actually needed.
   A recipe calling for 1 cup of flour and baked with 2 or more cups instead will surely result in a fail. And a rather dry baked good!

   And for liquid ingredients, use clear liquid measuring cups.
   Always place your liquid measuring cups on a flat level surface and bend down to check your level is correct.

6. Weigh Your Ingredients;
   A small kitchen scale is priceless! It is, by far, the most used tool in my kitchen.
   A gram or ounce is always a gram or an ounce, but a cup isn’t always a cup.

7. Get an Oven Thermometer;
   I use my ovens so much that the temperatures are sometimes off.
   Yes, the actual oven temperature can be much higher or lower than what the controller says.
   No ovens are safe from this!

   Use an oven thermometer. Place it in the center of your oven.
   While inexpensive, they’re irreplaceable in a baker’s kitchen. Place it in your oven so you always know the actual temperature.

   Unless you have a brand new or regularly calibrated oven, your oven’s temperature is likely inaccurate.

   Do you know what that will do to your biscuits, bread, cinnamon rolls, and cakes?
   While this might not seem like a big deal to you, it is a huge issue for the results of your baking.

   An inaccurate oven can ruin your baked goods, the hours spent on the recipe, the money spent on ingredients, and the results a disaster.
   If you use a convection oven or a fan-forced oven, a recipe will usually tell you to reduce the oven temperature slightly and maybe to reduce the baking time as well.

   Your eyes are the best tools for determining when a baked good is done.

8. Keep Your Oven Door Closed;
   You now know how the oven’s temperature can ruin a recipe.
   But what can completely throw off the oven temperature is constantly opening and closing the oven door to peek inside.

   It’s so tempting to keep the oven ajar to see your cake rising, cookies baking, and cupcakes puffing up.
   But doing so can let cool air in, which interrupts the baked good from cooking and/or rising properly.
   Rely on the light feature in your oven if it has one.

   If you need to test your cakes for doneness with a toothpick or bamboo skewer, do so quickly.
   Remove it from the oven, close the oven immediately, test for doneness, then put it back in as quickly as you can if more oven time is required.

9. Chill Your Biscuit/Cookie Dough;
   Chilling biscuit/cookie dough in the refrigerator firms it up, decreasing the possibility of over-spreading.
   Chilling your dough not only ensures a thicker, more solid biscuit/cookie but an enhanced flavour as well.
   Not only this, cold cookie dough is much easier to handle and shape.

   If a recipe calls for chilling the dough, don’t skip that step.
   If a recipe yields super sticky cookie dough, chill it before rolling and baking.

10. Never Increase The Recipe;
    If you want to double the batch of your recipe, never just double the ingredients.
    Baking is a science and you may not need double baking soda or baking powder.

    It is way safer to make two batches separately just to be on the safe side.

I do hope these baking tips are useful to you and enjoy your creations using our best baking recipes below.

↓ Best Baking Recipes ↓