Imagine this: You've spent the day slaving over in the Taylor library cubicles, racking your brain for your upcoming midterms. You're stressed, hungry, and just want a sweet treat. You see a simple recipe online that would be cheaper and have bigger portions than buying a dessert on campus. Heading home to destress and bake some cookies with your roommates, you imagine biting into a soft, decadent chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven. But after a few hours, your cookies come out crunchy as a rock.

How can you leverage your science background to enhance your baking skills?

Here are some tips to elevate your cookies, cakes, and other sweets! (You can also send this to a baking friend and reap the rewards; it's up to you!)

Ingredient Information

Much like how the enantiomers of a compound can have different biological effects, using variations of different ingredients can vastly change the texture and flavour profile of many baked goods. From sugars to butter, here are some ingredient variations to consider for your next treat!

White vs. Brown Sugar: While both types of sugars are delicious, the moisture content of brown sugar can create a big difference. Because of the increased molasses content, brown sugar leads to denser, chewier textures and a caramelized flavour. Removing molasses from white sugar gives the sugar a neutral, sweet taste, helping create airy, lighter textures. Changing the ratios in recipes can help make the desired effect.

All-Purpose vs. Cake vs. Bread Flour: With flour being essential to the structure of many baked goods, the main difference between the flour types is their protein content. Bread flour often contains the most protein, helping form a firmer structure and is useful for breads. The lighter structures found in items like cakes or pastries mean the lower protein content in cake flour is desirable. All-purpose flour has a protein content between both and can be used for many desserts and breads.

Browning Your Butter: The beloved Maillard reaction is a wonderful way to include richer, deeper flavours within your baking. Browned butter involves putting unsalted butter in a pan and heating up the butter. By evaporating the water, the milk solids can interact with the milk sugars for the Maillard reaction to occur, thus creating a toffee-like, nutty flavour; this can be used to enhance cookies, cakes, or even the sauces topped on your desserts!

Tools and Techniques

The best baking tools. (King Arthur Baking)

While an expensive Kitchen-Aid can be helpful, many ways exist to create delicious treats without breaking the bank! Sometimes technique makes more of a difference than the tools used.

Scale vs. Measuring Cups: Who knew that knowing how to use the scale found in your chemistry lab would also be beneficial in the kitchen? Using a scale compared to measuring cups can keep a consistent measurement as the scale measures using weight, while measuring cups use volume. This can help ensure the cookies or cakes you bake have a consistent batter each time.

If you don't have access to a scale, measuring dry ingredients like flour or sugar using the "scoop and sweep" method can help keep consistency. Take, for example, flour. The "scoop and sweep" method involves scooping flour with a spoon into the measuring cup and levelling off the flour with a flat tool. This lowers the risk of compressing the flour into the measuring cup if you scoop it using the measuring cup alone, leading to the proper ratio of flour within a recipe.

Whisks vs. Stand Mixers: Whisks and stand mixers are often used in baking to aerate batter, especially when creaming sugars and butter together. Adding air while mixing sugar and butter not only gives baked goods like cookies their fluffy and light texture, but also helps ensure the sugar and butter do not melt as quickly in the oven, preventing thin, flat cookies. Whisks and stand mixers do this job well, but whisks require more physical effort than the stand mixer. If the arm exercise sounds appealing, a whisk is a solid and economical tool — just make sure to scrape the bowl down with a spatula every so often to ensure the batter is homogenous for consistent results.

Fixing Baking Mistakes

How to soften hard cookies. (Whisked by Jenna)

Even if every step of a recipe is followed, mistakes still happen. Here are some solutions to common issues that can help ensure the hard work is still used to leave you with a delicious dessert!

Hard Cookies: Maybe you were too engrossed in your readings and lost track of time, or maybe you forgot to put the cookies away after cooling. Regardless, a crunchy cookie is not very appealing to eat. Placing the cookies in an airtight container with a piece of bread for a couple of hours can help. The bread reintroduces moisture into the cookies, leaving them soft and easy to eat. Alternatively, if the cookies are too hard, crushing them and using them as a substitute for cheesecake crust is also a good way to reduce waste.

Dry Cakes: A home-baked cake's dry, crumbly texture can be disappointing. Brushing a thin layer of simple syrup can help fix the problem. Simple syrup is made of sugar and water, and can reintroduce moisture without making the cake too soggy. There can even be extra additives such as lemon zest or coffee powder in the syrup to add extra flavour!

From cookies to cakes to croissants, the world of baking is filled with precision and chemical reactions to create the delicious treats seen everywhere. Armed with the correct tools and tips, turning the kitchen into a lab to craft desserts can be a fun and rewarding activity to do.