What is It?

Vanilla bean paste is a thick syrup made using vanilla bean pod seeds and vanilla extract.

Not only will it make your desserts look pretty (see the vanilla flecks in the frosting photo below), but it will also give them an intense vanilla flavor – think of vanilla bean ice cream compared to plain vanilla ice cream.

While crumb cakes designed to be enjoyed with coffee are wonderful, sometimes you want the coffee flavor in the dessert itself. There are four ways that I recommend you impart that coffee flavor to your baked goods.

Four Ways to Make Coffee Desserts

There are four main ways to get the flavor of coffee into your baked goods. You can combine methods within a single dessert, and keep in mind that many of these methods can also be used when baking with tea, too.

I don’t like letting leftovers go to waste! I have recipes for leftover cornbread, I turn leftover frosting into cookies, and leftover cake is not going to waste either – even if the cake is stale or overcooked.

Tips for Using Leftover Cake

Desserts made with honey won’t be the same as their sugar counterparts, but they are equally good in their own right. In general, cookies sweetened with honey are more chewy than crisp and cakes and cupcakes have a tighter crumb.

What is Lemon Zest?

The key to making it the right consistency for your particular dessert is knowing both the ratio of chocolate to cream to use and the temperature the mixture should be at. I delve into all of the details here.

Depending on the amount of cream used, ganache can be moist (like the filling for chocolate truffles) or stiff (like a cupcake frosting). It’s most commonly used as cake filling, a poured glaze, a spread or piped frosting, a decorative drizzle, as the base for truffles, or as a bonbon filling.

In this post, I provide some general guidelines on the differences between the two.

1. Cupcakes have frosting. Muffins do not.

2. The ingredient ratio is different. “A basic formula for muffins is 2 cups flour, 2-4 tablespoons sugar, 2½ teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 1 egg, ¼ cup oil, shortening or butter and 1 cup milk,” wrote Diana from Diana’s Desserts. When the fat, sugar, and egg to flour ratio in a recipe reaches double that of a muffin, you create a more open crumb and a sweeter end product – a cupcake. When the ratio is right and you get a cupcake, it’s a joyous thing!

I’ve tried baking with tea before, but I couldn’t get the tea flavor to come through strongly enough. I’ve tried:

• Grinding tea and putting it directly in the batter. This doesn’t release the tea flavor and people don’t like finding leaf bits in their cupcakes.
• Steeping the tea in milk and using the tea-infused milk. I imagine that this could work, but not all recipes contain milk – and if they do, it’s not always enough to strongly affect the cupcake flavor.
• Steeping tea bags in butter. The butter boiled, the flavor never changed, and the tea bags disintegrated. People like pieces of tea bag in their cupcake far less than they like leaves.

So what’s the best way to bake with tea?

I learned the secret to tea-infused baked goods from a now-defunct blog post by Robert Wemischner (author of Cooking with Tea [paid link] and The Dessert Architect [paid link]) on T Ching (I love the name!). The trick is…

Have you seen these new Russian piping tips? I teach cupcake decorating classes and, after seeing countless videos online, couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. They have been exploding in popularity over the last few months – and for good reason. They are easy to use (with a little practice, of course) and create beautiful designs with little time or effort. One of my fellow teachers calls them cheater tips; I told her to mind her own business. Supposedly, these tips came from Moscow and each design represents a different flower in Russia – that’s the rumor, anyway.

Why Use Weights for Measuring Flour

Working with weights is important if you want to be able to convert American recipes over to the metric system (converting flour from cups to grams). It’s also important if you want to break down a recipe to see the ratios of different ingredients – you should always do that by weight. Finally, using weights let you scale recipes up or down more easily and accurately.

Testing Methodology

If you do a Google search, you may find yourself on the Instructables page that says that a cup of all-purpose flour weighs 120 grams. Allrecipes says one cup of flour is 128 grams. Joy of Baking weighs in, calling one cup of flour 130 grams. Why is there a discrepancy, what number should you be using, and does it matter at all? I weighed 192 cups of flour to figure out how much a single cup of flour weighs!