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The Very Basics of Making Desserts

This page covers many introductory concepts that you should know in order to get the most out of your time in the kitchen. These are simple concepts but serve as the base for many future techniques you will learn.

I recommend familiarizing yourself with all of them:

• Baking

  As I'm sure you know, the essence of baking isn't much more than turning on the oven and placing your food inside to cook.

  Here are a few key concepts to keep in mind when baking anything:

  • Darker pans get hotter, as do glass. This means you'll usually want to lower the oven temperature by about 25°F when using a very dark or glass pan to keep from burning your food.
  • Open the oven door as little as possible. Opening the door can easily drop the oven temperature by as much as 50°F, affecting the cook time and quality of your final product.
  • If a range of time is given for doneness, e.g. 30-35 minutes, perform your first check after 30 minutes. Variances in oven temperatures (oven thermostats aren't perfect and lose accuracy over time) and pan material and color can affect your cooking time so checking at the lower time limit's usually a good idea.

  To help keep from burning or over cooking, calibrate your oven from time-to-time. Simply set your oven and place an oven thermometer inside, make sure you wait for the oven to reach the set temperature, read the thermometer and adjust the oven accordingly from then on. Doing this every 4-6 months will ensure accuracy.

• Beating

  There are various techniques when using an electric beater, but we're going to start with simple, quick beating. When using an electric mixer it's important to follow the recipe's directions. If the recipe doesn't state how quickly to mix then you should typically keep it on medium-low as you're more likely to have negative side effects when beating too quickly than too slowly. For example, if the recipe calls for beating on low for 2-3 minutes, it won't work out to your benefit to think that low for 3 minutes is the same as high for 30 seconds. Beating at improper speeds can have a drastic effect on the texture of your dessert.

  You should also stop regularly to scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula; this ensures everything gets incorporated evenly. However, for a simple mixing you probably won't have to scrape the sides more than once. Don't forget to give it one more quick mix after scraping the sides!

  You will see many recipes that call for you to use a paddle attachment, and of course use one if you have it. However, I think most people don't have one so using your standard beaters will usually be ok, just keep the power set to low.

  Another situation you will run into regularly is the need to slowly incorporate one ingredient into another. In this situation, unless otherwise directed, you should add a little, maybe 20-25%, beat until it's fully incorporated, scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula and repeat. If you simply add everything at once and start beating you might run into a couple problems: 1) You might get a lot of splatter, 2) Large lumps might form or an uneven incorporation.

  You've probably seen it on cooking shows, but you'll want to be sure to continuously move the beaters around the bowl while beating to keep things evenly mixed.

• Chilling

  Chilling is just about the easiest thing you will learn, but it's also extremely critical for many desserts. Chilling simply means to place the item in the fridge or freezer for a set period of time (the recipe will tell you where it needs to go); the time required changes with each recipe you make so be sure to follow the instructions.

  Be careful not to get into a hurry and pull the item out of the fridge or freezer too early. Certain temperatures need to be reached and if the item isn't chilled enough then you could either run into handling problems or you could simply ruin your dessert all together.

  It's not very often you can over chill your item, so if the recipe calls for chilling for 30-45 minutes, I would personally go with 45 minutes, just to be safe.

• Dot with Butter

  You will see this phrase used a lot with fruit pies and cobblers. All it means is for you to cut cold butter into small squares (a bit smaller than the pads you get at restaurants) and place them around the top of the filling, not mixing them in.

• Dropping

  Dropping is a basic technique that is used when placing a mixture in small quantities onto a baking sheet. The mixture is typically not solid enough that it can be easily handled with your hands, so you use a spoon, grab a set amount of the mixture and just 'drop' it onto the baking sheet. Making each dollop look the same is usually not desired in these circumstances, although uniformity in quantity is.

• Folding In

  Folding in, in essence, is nothing more than mixing very gently. The technique is used when you want to incorporate a very delicate product such as meringue into your dessert while minimizing the damage you do to the delicate item.

  Typically, when folding you want to use a spatula as they have a wide surface but are also very thin. What you want to do is use the spatula to gently pull the mixture from the bottom of the bowl and bring it up over the top in a 'folding' manner. You continue to repeat this until the mixture is fully incorporated; just be sure to not over mix.

• Over Mixing

  Mixing too much when making some desserts can be quite detrimental to the final texture or look of the item so it's very important that if the recipe says to not over mix, you don't.

  There are two main scenarios you'll run into from time to time that require you to be careful not to over mix:

  1. Using flour - When making a flour-based dough or batter over mixing will cause the gluten to develop, there's no need to go into the details on this but rest assured, over developing the gluten will make the final product rubbery. One example that many of you may be aware of is when making pancakes, even if you use the store-bought pancake mix it warns you not to over mix, that the batter will, and should, be lumpy. An over mixed pancake batter will make tough pancakes. The same goes for most other batters and many doughs as well.
  2. Folding in airy products - In some cases when making desserts you want them to be light and airy and sometimes to accomplish this, the recipe will call for you to fold in an airy product such as whipped cream or meringue. The light texture of these products come from when you make them, whipping them until millions of tiny air bubbles get captured inside. This is why folding these light ingredients is so important; it allows them to be mixed in without losing too many of the contained air bubbles. But no matter how gently you can fold, over folding will cause the air bubbles to be released and the light and airy texture will be lost.

  So be careful, if the recipes calls for you to not over mix, or if you think that's probably the case based on what I just said (the recipe author may have forgot to write it in), only mix until the two products are just barely incorporated, no more.

• Reactivity

  When making a dessert that is high in acidity, such as lemon meringue pie, you want to be sure to use nonreactive pans and bowls. Safe, nonreactive items include stainless steel, glass, ceramic and anodized aluminum. Copper and standard aluminum are the most commonly used reactive types; they will react with the acids causing a metallic flavor to permeate your food.

• Room Temperature

  When working with chilled ingredients, sometimes you want to keep them cold for as long as possible and sometimes you want to make sure they're at room temperature before doing anything with them.

  When a recipe calls for an ingredient to be brought to room temperature before using, it's a very good idea to do so. There are a couple reasons why they could be asking you to do this:

  1. Simply to make life easier; when using many dairy products such as cream cheese, if you try to work with it and blend it while it's still cold you will run into many problems and things could get messy.
  2. In some cases, the fact that it is at room temperature (but not heated) will allow some very important changes to be made that are critical to the texture of the dessert, this is often the case when working with butter.

  So if you know you're going to be making something that requires the use of cream cheese for example, you'll usually want to take it out of the fridge at least an hour before using it to ensure it has properly warmed up. You should avoid heating anything to raise it to room temperature as that can change its structure and thus how it interacts with the other ingredients.

  If you're working with butter and need to get it to room temperature quickly you can cut it into small cubes or if it's frozen, grate it.

• Sifting

  Sifting usually refers to flour or powdered (confectioners) sugar. It's the act of allowing the flour to be strained through a wire mesh. There are sifters made specifically for this purpose or you can use some of the various strainers as well, anything with those very, very small holes.

  Sifting helps lighten up many desserts, whether it‟s a cake or a frosting. However, many people are confused about whether you should measure before or after sifting. The recipe usually gives you the answer: If the recipe calls for "1 cup sifted flour", you sift it then measure it, if it calls for "1 cup flour, sifted"; you measure then sift.

  To sift you place your ingredient into your sifter and tap on the side of the sifter, knocking the ingredient into the bowl below, nice and sifted.

• Stove-Top

  Cooking on the stove can provide you with some of the best opportunities to burn your desserts, but as long as you follow the recipe and not leave anything unattended you should be fine.

  A couple quick tips to keep from burning anything:

  1. If the recipes calls for you to stir continuously, do so! There is a very good reason for it.
  2. Use heavy-duty pans; lightweight, thin pots and pans get hotspots on them when cooking and thus burn food more easily. Heavy pans spread the heat out more evenly, preventing those nasty hotspots.

  Be especially careful when heating dairy products as they burn very easily, stir a lot to make sure no bit of the liquid stays on the bottom of the pan for long.

  When melting anything on the stove-top you should generally expect to never raise the heat above low, most items you melt, such as chocolate morsels, burn easily.

• Thawing

  When thawing anything, it's almost always best to allow it to gradually rise to room temperature by letting it set out, or better yet allowing it to thaw in the fridge overnight. Using a microwave, stove or oven can cause parts of the items to cook while other parts stay frozen.

  If you need to thaw something quickly you can use a microwave but keep the power low and stir/rotate it regularly (about every minute or so) to keep any of it from getting too hot.

  When thawing fruit you should be aware that frozen fruit has more juice than the equivalent amount of fresh fruit. After frozen fruit is thawed you'll find a large amount of fruit juice; if the recipe calls for you to use fresh fruit you can often use this liquid in place of other liquids called for in the recipe.

• Wax Paper & Parchment Paper

  Wax paper has been used in the kitchen for a long time and is very handy to have around. Its primary use is simply to allow you to put your dessert on it to chill or set; once that's accomplished you can remove the dessert easily, no sticking.

  You will also see parchment paper out there; wax paper and parchment paper are both used as a non-stick layer between the pan and the food, allowing you to pull the dessert from its container easily without causing damage to the dessert.

  Although these two items are fairly similar, wax paper should be used when allowing something to set or chill and parchment paper should be used when baking. If you use wax paper in the oven and any part of it is showing it could burn and smoke. That being said, wax paper has been used in the oven for many years and although I recommend using parchment paper in the oven (you don't want any wax melting into your food), if you do need to use wax paper, you can. Just make sure it's completely covered by the food.

• Zesting

  Many recipes call for lemon or lime zest, you will also commonly see orange or any other fruit with a similar skin. To make zest you simply use a cheese grater to grate the very outside of the fruit you're using. Typically you'll want to try to use a grater with small holes as you only want the very outside, the white part just under the colored outer layer is bitter and undesired.