The Baking Help Thread
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@Lorne-Kates halp! I failed miserably at cupcakes @.@
- What controls the doming on the tops?
- What the fuck is wrong with "basic glacé icing" these instructions are ridiculous I'm starting to wonder if british teaspoons are bigger than American or british confectioner's sugar behaves differently or some crap? My book essentially says the same as God Housekeeping http://www.goodhousekeeping.co.uk/food/basic-glace-icing-recipe except that it says to add water a "few drops" at a time. Maybe I just have no patience (true) but it took ages and ages and then it turned into a thick, gummy paste and I said "Screw it" and dumped in another 2 tablespoons and only then did it seem to slightly get fluid.
And now I just have a big mess everywhere. I forgot baking papers so...
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@Yamikuronue Did you accidentally drop a whole egg into one of the openings in the lower picture?
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@Rhywden No, that's a severely domed cupcake with a heap of icing dumped on top.
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@Yamikuronue said in The Baking Help Thread:
@Rhywden No, that's a severely domed cupcake with a heap of icing dumped on top.
Ah, ok. Though the upper picture looks like a certain Japanese anime genre gone wrong. :p
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@Yamikuronue Hmm.
For the dome, I tend to err on the side of overfilling the muffin cups. If they bloom too much, I take the tin from tuna (or water chestnuts) that has had the top and bottom cut out. It's a metal rings now. I use it as a "cookie cutter" to uniform the domes.
For the icing, did you let those cupcakes cool completely before trying to ice them? When they come out of the oven, a couple minutes in the tin to let them settle. Then turn them upside down onto a CLEAN lint-free kitchen towel. Let them cool like that before moving to a rack. That way the steam escapes and doesn't make the bottoms soggy.
Are they very dense, or are they still light and puffy? If they're dense like bread or bricks, you missed something in the leavening process. How old is your baking soda? If they did leaven, but collapsed under their weight, it might be the flour. Are you using cake/pastry flour? If so, try substituting up to 1/3 with AP flour for the structure.
The icing-- I've never done a glace, but the recipe looks straightforward enough. Brittish icing sugar is the same as American, as far as I know. You are talking the very powdery stuff, that's sugar plus corn starch, yes? Not to raise a but did you measure sugar by weight or volume?
You may need the full 2 tablespoons, but dumping it in all at once may have destroyed the recipe. You only add a couple drops at a time. First, it lets you judge the consistency better. But second, and more importantly, if prevents the recipe from overheating. If you dump it all in, you get a huge puddle of heat just sitting there until you stir it. It may have harmed the sugar-- or caused the corn starch to clump. Picture 1, lower row, second from the left- the large cupcake-- it does look like there are some clear, jelly-like clumps. That may be the cornstarch clumping, rather than spreading out through the mixture and thickening it.
So to recap:
- Overfill and cut down to size. Eat the trimmings
- Leaven properly
- May need more hard flour
- DO NOT OVERMIX
- Let cool completely before icing
- Only add drops of boiling water at a time, never tablespoon(s) at once.
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@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
, did you let those cupcakes cool completely before trying to ice them?
Yeah, I let them sit about half an hour.
@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
Are they very dense, or are they still light and puffy?
They're puffy. These are store-bought mix, I was hping to play with decorative options and it turns out I'm terrible at decorating cupcakes.
@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
did you measure sugar by weight or volume?
I sifted into a bowl by weight on my baking scale.
@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
dumping it in all at once may have destroyed the recipe.
To clarify: I didn't dump until I'd been doing it by drops for so long it had turned into a gummy paste, at which point I said and added a couple more tablespoons.
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@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
boiling
Oh, it needs to be properly boiling, not just hot?
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@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
Brittish icing sugar is the same as American, as far as I know. You are talking the very powdery stuff, that's sugar plus corn starch, yes?
I was surprised to hear it had cornstarch so I googled it. Although it turns out the cornstarch is only a minor ingredient, as an anti-caking agent, it is apparently the case that it's usually different in North America. You guys use cornstarch, the rest of the world usually uses tricalcium phosphate. I have no idea if that would make any difference to the recipe.
Also British teaspoons are bigger than American ones, but only fractionally (we use the metric teaspoon, 5ml, whereas for most purposes Americans use one that's 4.9something ml. Of course that only applies to the standardised measurement. If you were measuring with an actual teaspoon, all bets are off.
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@Yamikuronue said in The Baking Help Thread:
@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
boiling
Oh, it needs to be properly boiling, not just hot?
I would guess it'd need to be at least hot enough to activate the cornstarch-- a bit above 200f. So it might as well be boiling, since it'll cool down.
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In other news i am not allowed to dye fondant in the living room anymore. THe carpet looks better with green splotches, right? They match my pants....?
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Harrumph. This didn't come out well at all.
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@Yamikuronue said in The Baking Help Thread:
Harrumph. This didn't come out well at all.
sez you. my stomach says "MARRRR! WANT THAT IN ME NOW!"
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Yeah, doming is basically "overfill the thing". Just on the verge of causing Muffin Top. Or just go full muffin. Fatty cupcakes are fiiiineee
I stick to cream cheese icing because I don't dig super-sweet, so I have no meaningful input on that either.
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@Yamikuronue Rule #1: What happens in the kitchen stays in the kitchen.
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I can't help you; I'm making goulash.
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I haven't discovered the recipe for cupcakes yet, but biscuits are easy. Just two ingredients.
Wheat flour and strawberries? Chop 'em up. Done.
Mushrooms and tuna? Chop 'em up. Done.
Duck eggs and goat cheese? Chop 'em up. Done.
Kale and kale? Chop 'em up. Done.
Hemp flour and hemp flour? Chop 'em up. Done.
The meat of a 1000 year old dragon and the brain of a 3-story-tall eagle with nine tentacle tails? Chop 'em up. Done.
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@Yamikuronue I highly recommend reading BakeWise by Shirley Corriher. Explanations from a chemist.
EDIT: Ok, so it oneboxes if I break the link syntax.
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@Greybeard I think your . is in the wrong place
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@ben_lubar God damn you now I want wheat flour and strawberry biscuits. WHY DOES REAL COOKING NOT WORK LIKE DWARVES.
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@Yamikuronue said in The Baking Help Thread:
store-bought mix
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@Yamikuronue A buttercream would have worked better than a glaze for that style of decoration.
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@Yamikuronue Is that a second batch or just different pictures of the same batch?
@blakeyrat said in The Baking Help Thread:
I can't help you; I'm making goulash.
So is Yami, as far as anyone can tell. =P
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Also, I agree with upthread: why a glace instead of a buttercream? That's dead easy. Pretty much equal parts icing sugar, and butter (or up to half of the fat as shortening for stability). Cream fats until smooth, then slowly add icing sugar. A drop of vanilla near the end. Keep adding icing sugar as needed until it tastes like icing and not sweetened butter. Done. Stable. It's what I used for @ben_lubar's cupcakes. (I was all out of dwarf nose and chipmunk toenails).
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@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
Is that a second batch or just different pictures of the same batch?
Different picture, after I got to play with fondant.
@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
why a glace instead of a buttercream?
So I'm baking my way through a very, very British book, and they start with a bit of fairy-cake decorating, and I thought, sure, why not, that looks simple, and I'll get to play with fondant.
Their pictures look gorgeous and have no relationship with my reality:
Silly Yami thought, "I know where I can get some fondant, and maybe next week I'll source marzipan, and I'll just whip up some storebought cupcakes and practice decorating them, so next time I make cupcakes for real I'll make them prettier than just icing with buttercream and adding sprinkles"
.... I think I'll just move on and try actual recipes now. Decorating appears to be not my thing.
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@Yamikuronue ....OH! I think I understand now! I should have been trying to make oobleck, but with sugar in.
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@Yamikuronue said in The Baking Help Thread:
Their pictures look gorgeous and have no relationship with my reality:
I'm guessing that the topping layer was not thick enough in terms of its consistency. OTOH, I'm not the best person to comment and the number of times I've decorated a cake can probably be listed on the thumbs of one hand. Possibly even true after a tragic accident…
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@ben_lubar said in The Baking Help Thread:
biscuits are easy.
Easy to make, assuming the ingredients are at hand. Perhaps not so easy to eat.
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@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
(I was all out of dwarf nose and chipmunk toenails).
Too bad, really, he probably would've appreciated that.
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@Yamikuronue Are those Blakeyrat cupcakes? Wow, I'm more popular in the UK than I thought.
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@blakeyrat said in The Baking Help Thread:
Are those Blakeyrat cupcakes?
Do you have fetching eyelashes like the picture?
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@FrostCat I paint on my eyebrows with food colo[u]ring every day, I'll have you know.
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@blakeyrat Sure are! You can tell by the way their eyeballs seem to be melting out of their heads. Apparently there's an open-source product being used just off the page.
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@blakeyrat said in The Baking Help Thread:
I paint on my eyebrows with food colo[u]ring every day, I'll have you know.
I am prepared to believe that.
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@Yamikuronue It looks like your icing is just too thin? In my experience it's fiddly as hell. I make hot cross buns a lot and 3/4 of the difficulty is in making the crosses on top.
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@AyGeePlus said in The Baking Help Thread:
3/4 of the difficulty is in making the crosses on top.
You can do that by burning the crosses in with a red hot poker. The traditional way.
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@AyGeePlus That was the impression I got.
With respect to the mix... is it possible that you over-stirred it? The leavening agent is a chemical reaction and it activates as soon as you add water, so you don't want to spend a long time mixing it. It needs to be mixed quickly and then you pour it into the baking pans right away.
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@anotherusername said in The Baking Help Thread:
is it possible that you over-stirred it?
The instructions told me to stir it a crapton. Next time I'll just make cupcakes from a known good recipe, I didn't expect it to matter for the tops being level :/
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@anotherusername Modern baking powder is 'double-acting'. The first round of bicarbonate decomposition makes tiny bubbles in the mixture that heat + gas expansion can enlarge into a crumb. As it gets hot in the oven it decomposes further and adds a second boost of leavening right as the batter is thickening.
at least, in theory. It seems like the insides of your cupcakes are leavened more than the rim? I'm not sure what that implies. Maybe that the oven was too cold, and couldn't inflate the batter faster than it offgassed? That is how you get dense unleavened bread in my experience.
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@anotherusername said in The Baking Help Thread:
is it possible that you over-stirred it?
I would agree: it seems the likely cause. Or the leavening in the store-bought mix could have gone off.
For the glaze, the water probably wasn't hot enough to dissolve all the sugar.
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@Weng said in The Baking Help Thread:
@ben_lubar God damn you now I want wheat flour and strawberry biscuits. WHY DOES REAL COOKING NOT WORK LIKE DWARVES.
How about wheat and cocoa beans? You don't even need to make the wheat into flour. Although you do need to craft the sugar cane into sugar to use it in cakes or pies. But at least they take no time to bake, unlike potatoes.
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@Lorne-Kates said in The Baking Help Thread:
British icing sugar is the same as American, as far as I know. You are talking the very powdery stuff, that's sugar plus corn starch, yes?
Was puzzling over strange Americans adulterating icing sugar with corn starch and discovered:
how is 'dried glucose syrup' not === glucose and why is it there anyway (and how did they manufacture the sucrose part if not by dehydrating sucrose syrup?)
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@japonicus said in The Baking Help Thread:
Americans adulterating icing sugar with corn starch
It's an anti-caking agent, meant to reduce clumps. That's all.
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Further, is sad to hear that the glucose (11%) was apparently produced by sweated labour and that there was no other way it could be done.
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@japonicus It's just not fair trade. All the sugar was produced by sweated labour, but the glucose was stolen!
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In my reader today: http://www.thekitchn.com/5-mistakes-to-avoid-when-making-buttercream-230656?utm_source=RSS&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Category%2FChannel%3A+Main
I am really tempted now to give cupcakes another go....
I didn't bake this past weekend because I had to go do a stupid podcast thing
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Tenuously related to the thread topic, this petition may be worth attention, (at least for rightpondians).