Baking season is heating up! You may be wondering how to prepare cookies, cakes, and pies that will warm your home, heart, and friendships. Besides reading up on baking tips and recipes, the best way to set yourself up for success is to have a versatile and well-stocked pantry. Here are five essential baking ingredients you should always have in your kitchen:
Flour is the starting point for almost all baking recipes, so we recommend having a bag of all-purpose flour, plus a bread flour and a whole-wheat flour around to cover your bases. If you have to pick just one, we recommend unbleached all-purpose flour since you can use it in over 90% of recipes where flour is called for.
Tip: A key differentiator in flours is how much gluten they have, which impacts how chewy or fluffy your end product will be. Bread flours have a lot of gluten, all-purpose flours have a medium amount, and pastry and cake flours have very little gluten in them. If you’re looking for a gluten-free baking flour, look for a gluten-free “one-for-one” flour which will normally be a blend of potato, tapioca, and rice flours that you can use wherever wheat flour is called for.
Butter, or a comparable vegan substitute, provides the heavenly flavor and life-giving moisture that makes baked goods cravable. We recommend unsalted butter for baking so you get to control how much salt is going in to your baked goods.
Tip: Be sure to keep butter wrapped tightly, as it can pick up odors in your fridge if you’re not careful.
Unless your main baking passion is bread (in which case you should stock up on yeast), you’ll need baking powder in just about every recipe to leaven your goods, or help them rise. For this reason, baking powder is the unsung hero of everything from zucchini bread to blueberry muffins.
Tip: Baking powder just needs water to leaven baked goods, while baking soda needs an acidic ingredient like lemon juice or buttermilk. Keep baking powder covered and away from moisture and it will stay good indefinitely.
Sugar provides the sweet core of most baked goods, but did you know that sugar is also essential to the moist, soft texture that defines many of our favorite cookies and cakes? In the chemical reactions of baking, sugar bonds with water, retaining moisture as well as preventing the formation of too much gluten, keeping your cakes tender instead of chewy. Sugar also helps your baked goods develop the golden brown color and crunchy edges that define many beloved desserts!
Tip: If you’re replacing sugar with alternatives like honey, maple syrup, or molasses, know that they will add an interesting new dimension to recipes, but won’t perform the same role as sugar in terms of chemistry and flavor. Honey and maple syrup will make your baked goods denser than sugar, and molasses can overpower the flavor of other ingredients.
In many ways, spices are what give baked goods their flavorful personalities and comforting identities. It’s important to have the basic ones around, and you likely already have many of these in your pantry. We’ll go on record here and say that, based on how many recipes they appear in, the essential baking spices to have on hand are:
Tip: Spices, especially ground ones, will go bad after 6 months to a year. To make sure yours don’t go to waste, check out our guide to fall spices and try making some savory recipes featuring your baking spices so you use them up before they lose their potency.
These basic ingredients for baking a cake are; flour, eggs, fat (usually butter), sugar, salt, a form of liquid (usually milk), and leavening agents (such as baking soda).
Much like pound cake, the 1-2-3-4 cake gets its name from the proportions of its base ingredients: one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs. It’s so straightforward, you may not even have to write it down—making it easy to impress friends and family with, oh, just a little something you whipped up.
Sugar provides the sweet core of most baked goods, but did you know that sugar is also essential to the moist, soft texture that defines many of our favorite cookies and cakes? In the chemical reactions of baking, sugar bonds with water, retaining moisture as well as preventing the formation of too much gluten, keeping your cakes tender instead of chewy. Sugar also helps your baked goods develop the golden brown color and crunchy edges that define many beloved desserts!
Butter, or a comparable vegan substitute, provides the heavenly flavor and life-giving moisture that makes baked goods cravable. We recommend unsalted butter for baking so you get to control how much salt is going in to your baked goods.
Tip: Spices, especially ground ones, will go bad after 6 months to a year. To make sure yours don’t go to waste, check out our guide to fall spices and try making some savory recipes featuring your baking spices so you use them up before they lose their potency.
Tip: If you’re replacing sugar with alternatives like honey, maple syrup, or molasses, know that they will add an interesting new dimension to recipes, but won’t perform the same role as sugar in terms of chemistry and flavor. Honey and maple syrup will make your baked goods denser than sugar, and molasses can overpower the flavor of other ingredients.
Baking season is heating up! You may be wondering how to prepare cookies, cakes, and pies that will warm your home, heart, and friendships. Besides reading up on baking tips and recipes, the best way to set yourself up for success is to have a versatile and well-stocked pantry. Here are five essential baking ingredients you should always have in your kitchen:
Easy Vanilla Sponge Cake [ Only 3 Ingredients ] Simple Sponge Cake Recipe
FAQ
What is the main ingredient in cake?
What are the 5 ingredients in a cake?
The five key ingredients every cake needs are flour, sugar, butter (or another fat), eggs and baking powder. Learn what each ingredient does to your cake!!
What ingredients are in candy?
Candies always have sugar in their composition. They may also have other sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup and some colorings.
What are the main ingredients in baking a cake?
Besides chocolate, almonds, canned and glazed fruit used in numerous recipes, the main ingredients for baking almost every type of cake are flour, sugar, eggs, fat, and leavening. These are must-have baking ingredients, and the baking cake itself is impossible without them. Why Is Flour One of the Main Ingredients in Baking a Cake?
How many ingredients are in a cake?
There are 5 main Cake Ingredients * – Flour, Eggs, Sugar, a raising agent and some kind of fat, such as butter. As a general rule, Flour and Eggs are there for structure, Sugar for sweetness, raising agent for air and Butter for flavour.