Thought/Tip Of The Day

Ok not every day or even every month but this time I have been experimenting with a lot of recipes (will get to posting them soon) but with it I have also bombed a few things :P (that isn't recently though) so I have come here with a tip of the trade.

Tip/Thought - Let batter style cooking/baking sit at least 10minutes (if folding items in, wait to add these items until after the wait time) and then give a nice good stir to the batter before pouring into baking dish/pan or adding ingredients you have to fold in (such as blue berries into blue berry muffin batter). Then bake as normal. This will allow your batter to absorb the wet ingredients rather then leave them to float to the top while baking, while the heavier ingredients sink to the bottom.

When I 'bake' things with gluten free flour whether it be cakes, breads or other sweets/savories I use to have this problem where all of my 'inside' ingredients would drop to the bottom of what ever it was I was baking before it actually baked. So instead of having this wonderful piece of cake with say blue berries going through it, all I had was this cake with a row of blueberry mush at the bottom.

I had thought about that and wondered what I could do to prevent it. Well the first thought was to go in after I had put it in the oven to bake and stir it just before it started to set but that was not a really good option as it's a good way to cause accidents.

Recently I made the most INCREDIBLE corn dogs (have recipe, have photos, will post!) and I noticed as I made them (made like 2 dozen of these things LOL) that the batter I was using started to get thicker and thicker the longer I let it sit. So my brain went into over drive.

A LONG while ago (last winter I think, might have even been the winter before) I had a craving for gold old American style corn bread. When I made it I took a recipe originally calling for some really odd amounts of wet-dry ingredients like using 3 whole eggs and 1 1/4 cups milk when your only using 2 cups dry ingredients... something else I didn't understand in this recipe was the fact that it called for over 1TBS of baking powder. So, I took the same recipe recently and made it using my editing and it came out wonderfully compared to last time. The BIGGEST thing I did to it though, was let it sit 10mins after it was mixed so it could have time to really absorb some of the wet ingredients. Then I gave it a really good stir, put it into my greased pan and baked it as normal.

Last time I made this recipe and did it as the recipe said, I ended up with a kind of corn custard style pie rather then soft moist corn muffins. All of the 'wet' stuff sank making a kind of sweet custard (recipe also called for 3/4cup sugar) and the corn/flour went to the top and actually created 2 layers to the thing. Although good in itself, it was not what I was looking for. This time it turned out perfectly though.

I'll get to posting more of the wonderful recipes I've been making and the photos to go with it!