Tips

Eggs – If you can get fresh eggs from your farmers’ market or Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), do so. (If you keep chickens or know someone who does, that’s even better.) The eggs will be fresher than any bought in a grocery store, and you can look at the yolks and tell that they’re more nutritious. (The yolks might be darker, especially in the summer when the chickens spend more time scratching outside.)

Flour – Usually all-purpose flour will work in recipes that don’t specify (its name pretty much tells you what you need to know). However, I try to use bread flour in any yeast-raised bread, as it helps with gluten production which improves the texture of the bread. It is worth seeking out cake or pastry flour if a recipe calls for it, since the low protein inhibits gluten production and will help make baked goods tender. If you want to substitute whole-wheat flour for white flour in a recipe, I’ve found that replacing about one fourth of the white flour with whole wheat works pretty well, and you can go up to one third in some recipes. If you can find whole-wheat pastry flour, you can substitute even more of the white flour.

Pancake mix – Don’t bother. There are a ton of scratch pancake recipes out there, and many of them take no longer to make than the kind from a mix. Pancakes from scratch are cheaper and better than anything that you’ll get in a mix.

Parchment paper muffin cups – These can be hard to find, but I can’t recommend them enough. I don’t like to grease muffin tins, but most muffin cups end up with pieces of muffin or cupcake stuck to them at the end of baking. The parchment paper muffin cups slip right off. The kind I use don’t have bleaches or dyes, which I also like.

Raisins – If you are using raisins in a cookie recipe, it is useful to plump them first. Some older recipes call for this already. If not, soak them in either alcohol to cover or in hot water flavored with about a teaspoon or so of vanilla or almond extract. The longer you leave them, the plumper, moister, and more flavorful they become. Drain off the liquid before using. (This is an especially good technique if your raisins are a little older or drier than you’d like.)

Shortening, measuring – Measuring shortening can be a huge mess. When I was a kid, my father taught me a way using water displacement. You put the amount of water equal to the amount of shortening that you need in a measuring cup, then add the shortening until the water rises to the amount that would be double what you need (for example, if you need half a cup of shortening, you add that amount of water, then add the shortening to the cup until the water rises to the 1 cup level). Pour off the water, and you now have the correct amount of shortening with less mess than using a dry measure.

Sugar – Once I started using bakers’ sugar, I realized there was no going back. You can also find it marked extra-fine granulated sugar. It is used in the same measurements as regular granulated sugar, but it is much finer, which means that it incorporates into dough and batters, as well as other recipes, more easily. An added benefit is that it is absorbed more readily into tea and other drinks. Raw sugar has a nice molasses type flavor and I use it for rolling molasses-type cookies (like gingersnaps) in.