Unf*ck Your Holiday Baking!
The difficult thing about baking is that once you’ve f*cked it up, there’s not much you can do, so a more appropriate subject line might be, How to Not F*ck Up Your Holiday Baking. But if you know you’re prone to any of these issues or have weird phobias about them (I am so dry cake-phobic I almost never eat cake) then you know where to look.
F*ck my cake is too dry
I’ve mostly pivoted from butter cakes to oil-based ones (aside from the recipe below, as you’ll see) because they tend to be moister. This is partly because vegetable oil or olive oil is an unsaturated fat, so it’s liquid at room temperature and thus cakes eaten at room temperature taste more moist. It also seems to be because the oil coats flour more quickly, which prevents gluten development and increases its tenderness. However, the extra water in butter can help to leaven a cake as it evaporates during baking.
Something else I’ve learned is that sugar helps keep baked goods moist. Sugar is hygroscopic, meaning that it absorbs moisture. I was shocked to see the difference between two batches of brownies whose only variation was in sweetened vs unsweetened cocoa powder — the sweeter version was fudgy and rich and the other was cakey and almost sponge-like. I like to reduce the sweetness in baking recipes, so I make sure to increase the liquid (e.g. milk or cream in the recipe) or increase the fat (adding butter increases the water content and the fat, while adding oil just increases the fat). Last, I can just increase the oven temperature so that the cake has a little less time to dry out. I’d never increase the temperature by more than 25° F though, and if I did bake it hotter, I’d test for doneness early.
A dry cake is also one of the few f*ck-ups that you can sort’ve unf*ck. Make a simple syrup, which you could flavor with lemon or grapefruit if you want, or get some maple syrup if that flavor works, and brush it onto the cake when it comes out of the oven. You can even use a toothpick to poke small holes all over the cake and drizzle more syrup in. Or mix some f*cking gin in and make boozy cakes the way I did for a friend’s birthday tea party.
F*ck my cake didn’t rise
Once a cake batter is mixed, it’s important to get it into the oven quickly. That’s because as soon as you’ve activated the baking soda by mixing it with acid, the batter begins producing carbon dioxide. You want that reaction to happen in the oven, where the baking will set the rise in place. A lot of recipes tell you to prepare your baking pans before you start mixing anything, so even if you want to ignore that like I do, just try to get the cake into the oven as soon after you’ve mixed the batter as you can. A couple other things to watch out for are not overmixing the batter and making sure your oven isn’t too hot, which you could check by purchasing an oven thermometer. You should also try to avoid opening the oven door until at least half of the bake-time has past, because if the cake isn’t set and comes into contact with cold air, it could fall in the center.
F*ck my cookies spread too much
If your cookies spread in the oven into one gigantic cookie, and for some reason you don’t want that, you may want to lower the sugar or liquid in the recipe. Holding their shape is also one reason that many recipes call for chilling dough in the fridge, since the fat becomes more solid and the sugar absorbs more of the liquid during that time. If you’re still having issues, you can raise the oven temperature so that they bake faster. Greased pans also cause cookies to spread, so you could either not grease the pans, or even better, use a Silpat or other baking mat under the cookies (Silpats are expensive but a great holiday gift idea!).
F*ck my cookies aren’t chewy
Increasing chewiness in cookies is mostly about increasing moisture and developing gluten in the dough. So you can increase the sugar and liquid to add moisture, but actually decrease the fat because fat inhibits gluten development (more on that in pies). You can also add an additional egg, which increases chewiness because of their high protein, and will make the cookies rise a little more as well. If you have a high protein flour like bread flour in the kitchen, you could substitute about half the all purpose flour in the recipe for the bread flour. Something I’ve begun playing around with is substituting almond butter for some of the fat and flour, which is another way of adding protein.
F*ck my cookies aren’t crispy
Crispy cookies tend to be a little dryer and a little higher in fat and have a lot of surface area exposed in the oven. So increasing the fat while lowering the moisture can help, as well as making them a bit smaller and baking them for longer. You can also increase the sugar or use white granulated sugar instead of brown sugar, which has more moisture.
F*ck my pastry isn’t tender
When we say a pastry is “tender” we usually mean that it’s crumbly or melts in your mouth, which is a little different from “flaky”, described below. That crumbly nature is achieved by having minimal gluten development, so the key is to handle the dough as little as possible. When mixing fat into the flour, you want to coat the flour with fat (as this will shorten their gluten strands), but once you start adding water, be careful not to overmix it. You can give the dough frequent rests in the fridge to help the gluten relax. Using alcohol in place of water is another way to tenderize the the dough, because it adds moisture without developing the gluten further. It’s also a good idea to use a low gluten flour like pastry flour (you can get whole wheat pastry flour if you want to be healthier).
F*ck my pie crust isn’t flaky
Like tender pastry, flaky pastry mandates minimal gluten development, so all the same rules apply as far as not overmixing the dough and giving it rests. The main differentiating factor is that the flaky layers come from cold bits of butter in the dough that turn to steam pockets during baking. While the fat was worked into the flour for tender pastry, which meant that the fat needed to be a little warm and that oil would be equally as effective as butter, for flaky pastry, butter is preferential. After cutting it into small chunks, keep the butter refrigerated until using and work it in with a pastry cutter or food processor (but don’t overmix!) unless you have dead icy-cold hands like me. Use ice water instead of room temperature water when you add the liquid. Chilling the dough right before baking is important, especially if you’re using a tart pan because if you put it into the oven at room temperature it will shrink during baking.