Intro

Aim: to collect tips and tricks, shortcuts and techniques to enable you to bring the most out of your cooking and help you to achieve perfectly delicious and presentable outcome from recipes for the first time every time

Intro: I’m a fairly accomplished amateur cook. My confidence in the kitchen comes from a solid foundation of basic techniques that I picked up over the years watching my chef mum cook for her family at home. I should be able to open a cookbook that is aimed at the general public, point at any recipe and recreate it at home. Well I should be able to, but to my own surprise, I can not. I would estimate that 70% of the time the end product is very different from what is described or pictured in the recipe, mostly edible but different.

I was once determined to bake a batch of red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting made famous in London by the Hummingbird Bakery. The recipe is not a secret and it is indeed published in the official Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook (Tarek Malouf Apr 2009). Armed with the recipe, I sourced the ingredients as described and followed the process to the absolute letter. It took me exactly 3 attempts to achieve the same result that the Bakery charge £2.65 for.

On my first attempt, the cupcake was orange and somewhat flat, after some research I came to the conclusion that I needed to buy natural unsweetened cocoa powder (such as Hershey’s) instead of using alkalised or dutch-processed unsweetened cocoa powder (such as Cadbury’s).

My second attempt did improve, but the colour was still more orange than deep red. This time the fault was pinned to the food colouring used: gel versus liquid food colouring. It seems that it is advisable to use gel not liquid colour with this kind of batter. The gel does not alter the consistency of the batter and provide a more vibrant, concentrated colour.

While I enjoyed the learning process, I was frustrated that the recipe did not state such result changing information. It turns out that the author often wants to include this kind of detail, but in reality there is not enough space in the book to go interact with the reader to such extent. Anyway, following my adventures with the red velvet cupcake I decided to collate the kind of information that is left out of cookery books and recipes et large.

Welcome to my site.