How to bake cakes: 5 precious rules
Now that we have known our oven and understood what the different types of cooking are, let’s see 10 basic rules for how to bake cakes at their best, which can be used for the preparation of sweet foods, but certainly also apply to our savory preparations!
1- The ingredients
The ingredients must be at room temperature : this rule, which is often not indicated in the recipe, is not only fundamental for creating a homogeneous and well-mixed pasta, but important during cooking. Indeed, the yeast can be activated at the right times without thermal shocks taking place and the cooking certainly appears more beautiful and homogeneous;
2- We know our oven
As described, each oven is different from the other and there may be variations of even 15 °! We can get a pastry thermometer to check if the oven temperature corresponds to the standards and then adjust accordingly. For example, if the oven set at 200 degrees marks 185 degrees in the thermometer, it means that it is ‘cold’, so we can raise it by about ten degrees during the cooking phase to reach the degrees indicated by the recipe;
3- Know the heating time
Again it is a practice that we can learn after a couple of attempts. Let’s try to understand how long it takes the oven to preheat, so we can calculate times well and also not waste resources at home, lightening the bill and doing good for the environment!
4- We always place the cake in the center of our oven
On which shelf of the oven are the cakes cooked? Cooking at the bottom risks burning the bottom while cooking at the top risks burning the upper part. So how high do you put the cake in the oven ? The truth lies in the middle.
It is better to place the pan in the center of the oven, to ensure that cooking is uniform, especially if we activate the ventilated function that introduces hot air into the appliance. This means that baking two cakes at the same time is impossible, except having a large enough oven available.
5- A good cooking starts from the sifted flour
The more homogeneous the dough, the easier it is to cook the cakes. All the powdered ingredients can be sieved to be well aerated and respond best in cooking, therefore we sift flour, yeast, cocoa and semolina and try to incorporate them to the other ingredients calmly and using low-power blenders, so as not to disassemble the manual work ;