The Basics of Cookies- It's All Here!

Over the last few years of writing this blog, I have received tons of very specific baking questions; about cookies being flat, or why butter needs to be room temperature, or whatever else it is that befuddles you about baking.  So today I'm going to give you the Cliffs Notes of baking cookies.  It's ALL in here.  You must have caught me in a good mood!  (Or maybe it's the margarita.  Oh, summertime...)

On your ingredients:

Unless you have a recipe that specifically calls for you to keep your ingredients cold, It will always  help if you have your ingredients at room temperature.  This is especially important for eggs and butter.  (See my blog on Why Eggs and Butter are the Axl Rose and Slash of Baking for the science of it)  Eggs and butter don't like to mix together because they're both made mainly of fat, but if you have them at room temperature, they get along better.  Its kind of like those mean girls in sororities who hate each other, but after a few beers they're best friends and crying about how much they love each other.  Heat is the beer in this situation.  It makes everyone a LOT friendlier.

Baking soda, baking powder, and salt are all the same thing- they're forms of sodium.  And under a microscope, sodium and sugar look very similar.  Sodium looks like little glass boxes with perfect corners and sugar looks like a little glass box with a lot of jagged edges.  Both of them help incorporate air into cookies.  We'll get to how much of that you want in a minute.  But cookies recipes that have you cream your butter and sugar together should tell you to cream your sugar, salt, baking soda, and/or baking powder together.  Go ahead and mix sugar, salt, and your baking soda/powder at the beginning and let them join the butter party.  Everyone's invited!

Extra stuff like chocolate chips, oatmeal, raisins, whatever should always be added last.  That means DEAD last.  Wait until you've added your flour and what's in your bowl is the perfect example of cookie dough.  Then you can add your extra stuff.  Why?  Because I said so.  And because it keeps the chocolate chips, fruit, etc in tact so that you get whole bits of delicious surprises as you bite into the cookie.  Oh, and because that extra stuff tears up gluten, which makes your cookie more crumbly.  It's not the end of the world or anything, but if you want to know a brief overview about what the &%!@ gluten is, read this blog.

Baking soda and baking powder are NOT the same!  Read this ancient blog I wrote to find out why.   Make sure you use what your recipe calls for. 

On mixing:

If a recipe tells you to "cream the butter and sugar together," that does not mean that you should beat the shit out of those two ingredients.  With most cookie recipes, you want to just combine the sugar and butter until they're blended.  (Room temperature sugar and butter, remember?  Don't make me repeat myself.)  If you incorporate too much air into the cookie, it spreads out and gets flat and crunchy.  And judging by the emails I get in my in box (which is whatthebleephappened@gmail.com, for all of your fan mail/ questions/ Whole Foods gift card donating needs) you all prefer soft, chewy cookies like we all grew up with out of the Soft Bake package.   Try to hold back.  Just blend the butter and sugar (and salt and baking soda/baking powder) until they're combined.   Then move on to the next step. 

Eggs are usually the next step.  We've already gone over that you've let them get to room temperature.  So now that you've mastered the art of letting an egg sit out on the counter for half an hour or so, make sure you don't add it too fast.  If you have 2 eggs to add to a recipe, add them one at a time.  Add Egg #1, and let the mixer blend it in.  At first the eggs look like they're separated- you'll actually see little fat bubbles that don't want to mix.  But if you're patient, and if your butter and eggs were room temperature, it will eventually blend together.  Then you want to turn the mixer off, take a rubber spatula and scrap all the way down to the bottom of the bowl to make sure you mix in any butter/eggs that have been left alone at the bottom, untouched.  Like little orphans.  Please.  Don't ignore the orphans.  Then, and only then, can you add the next egg.  If you happened to be making the most giant batch of cookies ever and you needed to add 100 eggs, you obviously wouldn't add them 1 at a time.  You'd add them like 1/4 at a time.  Use your common sense here, people. 

On Baking:

Let's talk preheating.  You preheat your oven for a reason, people!  If I can quote myself here from yet another ancient blog, "While a hot oven will force a cake into its submission and make it rise like no one's business, an oven that's not pre-heated will basically just sip a cocktail, nudge your cake and ask, "Do you want to bake or what? Yeah, I didn't think so."  Put your cookies in the oven to BAKE.  If your oven isn't hot, what's the point?  A slow, painful death to the chocolate chips?  There's so much happening: high heat makes water turn into steam which helps things rise, which helps baking soda finish its very important job, which makes sugar caramelize into golden pieces of heaven... Just preheat the damn oven until it beeps at you, ok?  And then give it another 10 minutes or so for good measure. 

Chill the dough before you scoop it out and lay it on a pan.  Even better, scoop it out, lay it on the pan, and then chill it.  Freeze it, even.  This gives you a chewier, softer cookie every time.

Your recipe doesn't always know how long to bake your cookies for.  12-15 minutes doesn't always mean 12-15 minutes.  I remember working a pastry externship at a lovely restaurant in San Francisco with a very lovely chef who went on to star on many a Bravo and Food Network TV shows, and if there's one thing I learned there, its that you don't bake things for a certain amount of time, you bake them until they're done.  Every oven is different.  How cold or hot the weather is affects baking.   Humidity affects baking.  So if your recipe says 12-15 minutes and after 15 minutes you look at your cookies and they're still doughy and undercooked, then leave them in there longer.  WE ALL KNOW WHAT A COOKIE LOOKS LIKE.  Trust yourself to make that decision to say "Yes.  This cookie is finished and I will now remove it from the oven because the time has come."  The same goes for cookies baking much faster than you think.  If those suckers look done at 9 minutes, then you better take them out before their prescribed time of 12-15 minutes.  And if you don't and you burn them, it's your fault.  You saw they were done, didn't you?

If you bake a lot, I recommend investing in a couple of good sheet pans.  Home bakers call them cookie sheets, but we in the industry (or we who used to be in the industry and have since escaped, thank the universe) call them sheet pans.   They're usually made of aluminum, they have durable sides, they're uber sturdy and will last you a gazillion years if you treat them right, and if you line them with parchment paper instead of coating them with butter and flour, they're super easy to clean.  Do yourself a favor and purchase a couple from a restaurant supply store, not Williams Sonoma or Sur la Table.  As much as I love those two stores' cookbook selections, they'll charge you triple for a shopping experience with better lighting.  Not worth it.

On what to do when you've messed up:

Cookies a little over done?  Too much baking soda and the texture is all funky?  No problem.  Freeze it and save it to blend it into a milkshake when you want to eat your feelings.  Crumble it into a bowl and pour milk over it and pretend like you're 8 years old watching Saturday morning cartoons eating a Cookie Crisp.  (God, how I MISS Cookie Crisp.  Damn you, diets!)  Puree it up and use it instead of graham cracker crumbs for a cheesecake crust.  Homemade chocolate chip cookie crust?  You just made like 14 new friends.  Puree it up, freeze it, and rim a martini glass in it for some kind of decadent signature holiday drink.   You can do that with almost anything!  I once drank a martini in a glass rimmed with pretzels.  I don't remember much after that, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it.

Help out the Cake Fraggles!

Dear Tricia, I was making a 3 level cake for my boyfriend's birthday, and decided to try and save some time by baking the whole thing in one bundt pan. I tried compensating for baking time, but after the cake mostly baked and cooled, the whole thing collapsed in the pan because there was some uncooked batter in the center. I ended up throwing out the whole thing and not making life any easier. Was there something I did wrong other than not baking it long enough? And in the future, what could I have done to salvage a dessert from a mostly (but not entirely) baked and collapsed cake? And also what are ways to convert 3-layer recipes into something less work intensive?

Wow, I'm impressed! I've never made a 3 level cake for anyone without it involving a paycheck. Not even my husband. (I got him beef jerky for Christmas though. Pretty sure that counts for something in the Awesome Department.)
Basically what you did wrong was put way too much batter in the pan- there was just no where for it to go. Let's imagine you're back to square one and you're making the recipe in 3 pans. Each pan has... let me think of something cute and memorable... Cake Fraggles. Right, each pan has 3 Cake Fraggles that do the heavy lifting and push the cake batter up to rise and become a fluffy delicious birthday treat. As the cake rises it uses the sides of the pan for some extra support while those Fraggles do the heavy lifting. Got that image in your head? Ok, now imagine taking all of the cake batter, putting it in 1 pan, and expecting just 3 Cake Fraggles to lift up 3 times as much weight. It's too heavy the cake isn't going anywhere- definitely not up. So now you've got 3 exhausted Cake Fraggles who have given up and are moving on to cocktails by now, and cake batter that is just going to sit and sit and sit. Even if you left the pan in the oven for an entire day, the outside would over bake and be a crispy hot mess before the inside came anywhere close to baking. It's too much mass in too small of a space to give you the same results.
I hope I didn't get too far out there with the Cake Fraggle references. In my mind they're adorable and magical and house trained.

So what to do with the mass of uncooked batter? If you're cool with eating potentially raw eggs**, I recommend mixing it in with ice cream or adding heavy cream and putting it in an ice cream maker for some cake batter ice cream. For the stuff that is baked, you cut it into pieces and put it in a bowl or a parfait glass (let's be serious, who owns parfait glasses?) or a martini glass and layer it with fruit and whipped cream for a ghetto version of a trifle. You can also blend it up into cake crumbs, and use that to garnish your next baked goodie (free of What the Bleep moments I hope) like on the top of cupcake frosting or on the side of a cake.

In the future, if you're wanting to make a smaller version of a tiered cake, you've got to make less batter, first and foremost. Take your recipe, cut the measurement of each ingredient in half and go from there. If you fill a pan with batter and the pan is more than 2/3 full, you're in trouble. I don't event like to fill the pan more than half full, but you know your recipe better than I do. You've got to have some room on the side of the pan for the cake to rise. Give the Cake Fraggles a break already.

**For anyone who says "You can't eat raw eggs! I'd never do that! It's gross!" I just want to remind you that, next time you're digging into the raw cookie dough/eating your feelings, guess what's included? Raw eggs. I doubt that knowing that will stop you next time either you flip-flopper.

Imposter Chocolate Chip Cookies!

Dear Tricia, My dad makes AWESOME chocolate chip cookies. When I asked for the recipe he told me he used the recipe off the back of the Toll House bag. So I tried to make cookies at home and they didn’t taste right. The only thing I could come up with, is the he used “real” vanilla extract, and the only thing I had was “imitation” vanilla that I use to keep my cake icings white. Could the “imitation” be the flavor culprit?

Hmmm... they tasted different when you only changed one thing, so my first instinct is to say, yes, that's the culprit. That's just logical. But I can't write a one sentence blog, so lets take a quick class on vanilla, shall we?
Real vanilla extract comes from vanilla beans, which are grown in hot, humid areas ranging from Mexico all the way down to the West Indies and South America. Vanilla has been around since the 15th Century (well, I'm sure its been around longer, but that's when "we" discovered it) and is the second most expensive spice in the world, right behind saffron. Vanilla is so expensive because it takes so damn long for actual plants to grow. A vanilla plant will need 3 years just to be strong enough to grow the vanilla blossoms that will turn into vanilla pods. But remember 4th grade science and all that talk about pollination? Well the only insect that can successfully pollinate a vanilla blossom is one single type of bee that only lives in Mexico. And as I've already mentioned, vanilla grows in lots of places outside of Mexico. So guess who has to pollinate it? The growers. Vanilla has to be pollinated by hand within 12 hours of the blossoms opening. That's it. A 12 hour window or nothing else. After each blossom is painstakingly pollinated by human hands, it needs another 10 months just to grow the vanilla pods, which are what we use for baking. That's a pretty high maintenance plant. Super needy. (Ladies, when it comes to relationships, don't try to be too much like a vanilla plant. Positive results probably aren't in your favor.) But then it keeps going... after the pods are harvested, they have to be aged, dried, cured, "sweated", conditioned... it goes through a months-long process of being wrapped in fabrics and left in boxes and dipped in boiling water and all kinds of booby traps that help it develop its characteristic flavors. No wonder its so freaking expensive.
So, back to Imitation Vanilla. You know how every celebrity has a designer perfume? Like Paris Hilton, for example, will go on and on about how her perfume has components of grapefruit, musk, and vanilla, and cheap hooker in it? The designer imposter version of her perfume probably only has a limited number of those components in it. Most likely the cheap hooker one, since that's the most recognizable. Well vanilla has 171 identifiable aromatic components. (Imagine having the job that defines all those... crazy.) And imitation vanilla only has 1 of those components in it, Vanillin. And unfortunately, vanillin is produced as a by product of the paper industry. Gross. This is why the complexity of the real deal is so much more noticeable than the fake one. And possibly why your cookies taste different than your dads.
If you decide that real vanilla is something you want to include in your baking, you don't always have to use vanilla extract. You can also find ground vanilla pods (vanilla powder), vanilla sugar, or you can use the whole pods, which can get expensive.
The other thing I thought of... butter. In baking, you're usually supposed to use unsalted butter because salt is already going to be included somewhere else in the recipe. Find out if he's using salted butter, or maybe you are and didn't realize it. That could also affect the flavor. Let me know how it works out for you.

The Case of the Spooge-ing Cinnamon Rolls

Dear Tricia, My cinnamon rolls keep pooping out all their goo and I can't figure out how to make this stop. I tried proofing the hell out of them after rolling them wicked tight, but when I baked them, the dough kinda withered and the filling just spooged out all over the pan. Any ideas?

This is going to be one of those questions that ends up in my 2nd or 3rd book. My agent told me she sees this blog published as a series, so I'm going to make one of the books focus more on the advanced questions that I sometimes get in my email box. Because seriously, most people don't make cinnamon rolls from scratch. So good on you for that.
There's a few things we can trouble shoot here. First of all, the part where you roll them wicked tight: that's gotta go. Let me back up though. Here's what's going on inside the dough:
Yeast is this little, magical, live being that eats and poops, just like everything else on the planet. After it eats sugar, its main source of food, it leaves behind carbon dioxide and water as a waste product. (Fancy term for poop.) And the carbon dioxide bubbles are what make the bread rise when you proof it (for all of you non-bakers, that's when you let the dough rise before you bake it). When you let proof the dough, the carbon dioxide bubbles are forming, and when you bake it, the bubbles expand.
This is where the rolling it wicked tight part doesn't work. When the dough is getting bigger in the oven, the yeast needs somewhere to grow and expand. And if you've rolled it really tight, there's nowhere to go but up. So then you've got a cinnamon roll with the center popping up and out, possibly causing all of the filling come out with it.
Proofing the hell out of the dough is also something that you might want to change. I'm going to quote my favorite reference book, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. Even though he's not the expert when it comes to baking bread, he is the expert at explaining food science and chemistry, so what he says goes. "When poked with a finger, fully fermented dough will retain the impression and will not spring back." What over-proofing bread (what you're doing) will look like is a wobbly water-balloon looking thing that, when you poke it, has the potential to just collapse. It probably already does that, since you said its withering. So if you proof the hell out them and then bake them, the heavy filling is likely going to climb out on top of the cinnamon roll simply because the dough is weak enough to let it. And no one likes weak, girly-man cinnamon rolls.
Last thing: what's your filling like? Does it have a ton of sugar in it and not much else? In baking, there are 2 categories of ingredients: liquifiers and stablizers. Things like flour and eggs are stablizers, and surprise! Sugar is a liquifier. So if your filling has brown sugar and corn syrup and powdered sugar and all kinds of other sugars in it, it just wants to make the filling thinner and goopier, and melt when it bakes and make a mess and get all over everything. That's fine and dandy, but it contributes to your filling spooging problem. I don't want to re-write your recipe- there's probably a very good reason why you use that filling- but it might need more stablizers in it, even if its just nuts and a little bit of egg white. So if you have the creative freedom to do so, make a thicker filling that stays put.
So, you're going to need to proof the dough less to give the dough more muscle to support the heavy filling, and roll it looser to give the dough somewhere to grow besides up. If these don't work, try messing around with the filling to make it thicker. And then let me know how it works out because the suspense is already killing me.
For more blogging on liquifiers and stablizers, check out my post, "Damn you, Cream Cheese Frosting!" Also, if you're on Facebook, check out the fan page for Chef Richard Coppedge, my breads instructor in school. He's super smart when it comes to anything involving yeast, and he can also do the splits. (While you're on there, don't forget to become a fan of my facebook page too.)

Silicone and Cindy Crawford: How it Relates to Your Tart

Dear Tricia, I've recently acquired a silicone dish for baking pies, tarts, cheesecakes, etc. I must say, it works pretty well, but I've noticed a big difference concerning the crustiness of some of the things I bake. For example: I like to make a kind of salty tart out of a crust (pâte brisée), tomatoes, mozzarella and dijon mustard. With the tomatoes, you can imagine that I have a hard time keeping the "wateriness" to a minimum. When I use the silicone dish, the tart comes out pretty darn watery, but with a glass or metal dish, the water seems to disappear! The question is this really: What is the real difference between silicone dishes and normal baking apparatuses (I know that's latin based, so it's gotta be apparati or something stupid like that)? Are the pros and cons for each one aside the obvious "crustiness" that comes from using normal baking dishes?

Ooooh, I love this one. Mostly, because it involves physics and I'm always trying to up my game in that department. After much research, I couldn't find the information I needed in relation to baking dishes, so I emailed my favorite chef, Peter Greweling, who is my mentor, my former instructor, and author of Chocolates & Confections, and the recently released Chocolates and Confections at Home. He also loves martinis, so we share that priceless connection.
A baking dish basically serves two purposes: to hold the batter or dough, and to transfer heat from the oven to the product inside of the baking dish. When its transferring heat, that's called "conducting." Lets talk about conducting heat: remember that topic in elementary school? Everything conducts heat. Good heat conductors are metals: think aluminum foil, iron, steel... things that baking dishes are often made out of. Glass? Eh... its okay. Silicone? Not awesome. Imagine holding a two cups of super hot coffee, one is made out of aluminum, and one made out of silicone. Which one is going to burn your hand faster? The aluminum one, because it conducts heat better, or transfers the heat to you faster.
Lets apply that to baking dishes. An aluminum or steel tart pan is going to take the heat from the oven and transfer it to the tart dough super fast. That, in turn will caramelize the sugars in the dough really well, brown the proteins in the flour like a champ, and give you a brown and crusty finish. Because your silicone baking pan, though convenient to use (we'll get to that in a minute), doesn't conduct heat very well, its going to give you a less crusty and lighter colored tart if you baked it at the same temperature. The same idea applies to the watery tomatoes inside the tart. The heat is being transfered throughout the entire product and the idea is to make the water in the tomatoes evaporate, but if its not getting enough heat to do that, the water will just hang out and create a sog party. Gross.
Silicone baking dishes are a newer revolution in the baking world. For gazillions of years, we've been baking things in metal pans. But this new idea of silicone pans is great because they're flexible and things don't stick to them, so you can literally peel the cake pan off a cake without having to bang it on the counter top to get it out. Tart pans are notorious for being little assholes. You put all that work into your gorgeous tomato tart creation, but if the crust sticks to the sides of the pan, it breaks and cracks and disappoints everyone and ruins dinner. So I get why silicone tart pans are ideal. It may give us cancer 50 years down the road and we end up with PVC pipes as intestines, but oh well... it's FDA approved and they know everything about everything, right?
So, back to your dilemma. All you really need to do is turn up the temperature of your oven to create more heat. If the recipe says 375 degrees, go up to 425 and see how it does. If the tart fillings start to dry up too much, put a piece of foil over them to keep them covered until the crust is finished... or you could just turn the oven down a little at that point: whatever works for you.
Lets summarize today's physics lesson. Metal baking dishes are like the Cindy Crawford of baking dishes: if heat was makeup, she don't require a lot of it to be smoking hot. Silicone baking dishes are like Sarah, Plain and Tall: sure, she's practical and efficient, but she needs a hell of a lot more makeup to get to Cindy Crawford's level, doesn't she?

Its a Nice Day for a White Wedding Cake

Dear Tricia, How can I make WHITE white cake? Can I bake with the yolks? Do I have to separate them?

I'm going to refer back to an older blog from last winter about how to get white butter frosting:

OK friend, easy answer. Your icing turned yellow because half the ingredients in your recipe are YELLOW. The only way to fix this is to use icing with no yellow ingredients, or perhaps one of the following:

1. Learn to breed albino cows that make white butter with their milk.
2. Use only egg whites, or even better... use the white shell too for extra whitening. Hell, throw in some whitening toothpaste while you're at it. And a dash of Oxy Clean!
3. Re-construct the color spectrum so that our eyes see yellow as white. I see this one as the most feasible option.

For real though, anytime you want white icing, you're going to have to use mostly shortening as the fat because it's white. Even with butter cream icing, and listen up brides because this is directed at you, you'll never get solid white frosting because butter cream has BUTTER in it. It is yellow. It is not white and it never will be. (Although I've seen some crazy mothers of brides get away with some crazy stuff... maybe one of them will figure out how to change the color spectrum.)



This question is along those same lines, but on a less-extreme level that I promise I will judge you much less for. I think I might have been having a bad day when i wrote that.
You can't get white cake that is truly white if you add a bunch of whole eggs because yolks are- you guessed it- yellow. So the goal here is to add as few yellow ingredients as possible, or a large amount of whipped egg whites to offset the color. Think of angel food cake and how virginal white it is: the main ingredients are sugar, egg whites, flour, which are all white. However, those ingredients don't make for a very sturdy cake... Angel food cake would be like the Michael Jackson of cakes: super frail and white. But if you're looking for a sturdier (isn't it weird that "sturdier" is a real word? I think its weird.) cake that is less squishy and more suitable for decorating, you're going to have to add a few extra ingredients that will also make it less white, like whole eggs or butter, and that's ok, as long as the white stuff is the main ingredient.
Here's a recipe for a basic white chiffon cake with the whole egg, but you separate the whites from the yolks and beat them separately. It involves a few more steps than your average cake recipe, but if you can master it, is a traditional cake recipe that you will be able to use forever. When I was in pastry school, this was the type of cake we used for our basic white wedding cakes. It does have a fair amount of butter, but because of all the egg whites you're using, it will still be pretty white. My favorite recipe is from the Fanny Farmer Baking Book, but I've made some modifications to it.

1- 10' Cake

2 1/4 cups cake flour*
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
6 egg yolks
3/4 cup water
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
8 egg whites

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
1. Combine the flour, 3/4 cup of the sugar, baking powder, salt, and sift them together into a large mixing bowl.
2. Add the oil, egg yolks, water, and vanilla and beat until completely smooth.
3. In a separate large mixing bowl, beat the egg whites until they begin to foam. Slowly add the remaining 3/4 cup sugar and beat until the whites are stiff. **
4. Gently stir in 1/3 of the egg whites into the batter.
5. Drop the remaining whites on the batter and fold them in.
6. Pour into ungreased cake pan with parchment paper on the bottom.***

Bake until top is golden brown and the middle springs back when you press it with your finger. If you're using my oven, that's 25-30 minutes, but it could take way less in yours. Stop letting your oven timer rule your life and just check it every now and until for golden color and to test it with your finger.


*Refer to my "Hyper Hypo Loves Christmas Cookies" blog entry on why you should use cake flour instead of all purpose flour.
** Refer to my "Diana Ross, Daryl Hannah, and Your Meringue" blog entry on more tips for whipping super fluffy egg whites.
*** If you grease the pan, the batter won't have anything to grab on to as it rises. When its done, use a butter knife to loosen the cake from the sides of the pan and turn it upside down on a rack to cool.

Hyper Hypo Loves Christmas Cookies!

Dear Tricia, I'm getting really (overly) excited about my Christmas cookie baking this year. Here's a few questions for you that may help me with my (over)planning. My whole adult life I have wanted to use cake flour and/or pastry flour. What makes these flours different? Can I use cake flour to make my awesome Christmas cookies? Where can I get really cool sprinkles? The ones found the grocery store are the same ones my grandmother used (circa 1972) and I want something different. Are canned frostings a sin?

Considering I got this email in October, "overly" excited for Christmas might not quite cover it. Obsessively excited, perhaps? Completely enraptured? Either way, thanks for thinking of me in regards to your (over)planning. I'm (over)flattered.
Cake and pastry flours are different than other flours because they have less protein. Flour that has a lot of protein makes things dense and chewy... think bread and pasta. Its kind of like the protein content tells you how much muscle the flour has in it. Bread flour has a lot of muscle (it has about 14% protein content), and that's not what you want in delicate things like cake and cookies. So cake and pastry flours have much less protein (about 8% protein content) and a lot more starch in them. Its like bread flour is one of those oily, overly tanned competitive body builders, and pastry flour is Nancy Reagan. Which one do you think would make a better cake? This is why all purpose flour has its name: the protein content is around 11% so its a happy medium between bread and pastry flours.
You can actually see how much more starchy pastry and cake flours are, compared to bread or all purpose flour. If you hold pastry flour in your hand and squeeze it tight, it will stay together in a tight little clump. Bread flour, because it has less starch and more protein, will just go back into a loose pile in your hand when you squeeze it. I can't even begin to tell you how many times this trick comes in handy when someone has forgotten to label the flour bins correctly in some of the kitchens I've worked in.
As far as which one to use for your cookies, either one would be fine. You probably won't notice much of a difference between cake or pastry flour because the protein content only differs by about 1%.
Its perfectly acceptable to use frosting out of a can. You have my blessing. Considering the fact that you're making your cookies from scratch, I'd say that cheating on the frosting still allows you to say your cookies are homemade. I am a fan of making old school, water-and-powdered-sugar frosting with food coloring in it, but the frosting out of a can is nice because it's really thick.
Sprinkles are coming back in a huge way now that cupcakes are really trendy. Sur La Table, Williams Sonoma, and other specialty cooking stores have a pretty decent selection. But if you know of a cake decorating store nearby, and you have a high tolerance for old ladies in large groups, that's going to be the best option because they won't overcharge you like Sur la Table and Williams Sonoma will. (Paying 8 bucks for a tiny can of sprinkles is ridiculous.) Craft stores also carry a lot of cake decorating items and you should be able to find sprinkles there. I've even found some cool ones on one of my favorite websites, etsy.com. And if you still haven't found anything that suits your fancy, Whole Foods, Central Market, and other specialty grocery stores should have a decent selection, plus theirs are all natural.
Make sure you send in photos of your cookies! I'll put them up on the fan page for What the Bleep Happened to My Rump Roast on facebook.

My Cookies are Vulgar and Offensive

Dear Tricia, Why don't my cookies seem to hold their shape? I want some of the kind you get from a cookie bouquet, but my cookies always spread and look rather vulgar. Or maybe I'm just dirty and think they look vulgar...

Yes, you are vulgar. And frankly, without a little bit of vulgarity, you probably wouldn't read my blog... so don't worry too much about it because I'm certainly not fussing about a little naughtiness.
Let me back up for a second and explain what cookie bouquets are to those who have never lived in the suburbs, or to anyone born after 1994. Cookie bouquets are basic shortbread cookies that are cut into different shapes, baked on lollipop sticks or dowel rods, stuck in a basket, and decorated with colorful frosting. They're meant to look like a bouquet of flowers, but surprise! You can eat them. How clever. In the 90's you saw Cookie Bouquet franchise bakeries that popped up in strip malls all over America, only to close down a few years later. I predict that the cupcake bakery trend is soon to follow. Sorry, Sprinkles Cupcakes. Your overpriced treats can't fool me or the economy.
A traditional cookie recipe focuses mainly on flavor and texture, so they're guaranteed to spread out to give you a non-descript blob to decorate. Cookie bouquet cookies are meant for looks, so there is a specific recipe that you need to follow to give you a sturdy, firm, non-vulgar product that won't change shape when it bakes. To get this recipe, I contacted my Aunt Mary, cake-decorator extraordinaire and cookie bouquet expert. (She also used to make my birthday cakes when I was a kid, including a super sweet Ziggy cake, c. 1987.) This is the recipe she swears by:

3 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp. Baking Powder
1/2 tsp. Salt
1 1/2 cups Sugar
2 sticks (8 oz) butter or margarine
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp. Vanilla

Mix flour, baking powder and salt in medium bowl. Set aside.
Cream margarine and sugar until just combined .
Add eggs, one at a time until well blended.
Add vanilla.
Add flour mixture a little at a time until all ingredients are blended.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 1 hour.
Roll dough out 1/4" thick. Cut out shapes. (This makes cookies thick enough to push skewers into the cookie dough to make cookie bouquets).
Bake at 350' for 8-10 minutes (until cookie edge turns light brown). Dough can be refrigerated for up to 2 weeks.

This is a very simple recipe to follow, but I just wanted to stress a few things, and you should already know them if you're a regular reader:
You have to preheat your oven. To quote myself in one of my older blog posts, "Is your oven pre-heated? While a hot oven will force a cake into its submission and make it rise like no one's business, an oven that's not done pre-heating will basically just sip a cocktail, nudge your cake and ask, "Do you want to bake or what? Yeah, I didn't think so." Just let the oven do its work and wait until its hot before you put anything in.
Do not over-cream your butter and sugar. With cakes and cupcakes, you need to cream butter and sugar until they're light and fluffy, but with cookies, its a really bad idea (just like that train wreck of a reality show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Why are those people famous again?) because it makes the cookies spread out and get really flat. Then weird, blobby vulgarity ensues, and that's exactly what you're trying to avoid here, right? (Wait... let me double check... um.... yes, that's what you wrote me for.)
Apparently these cookies freeze really well after they're baked, so if you're really busy you can make them ahead of time and decorate them later. I definitely fall into that category, seeing as how I just downloaded two new games for my Wii. Seriously, there just aren't enough hours in the day.
For more edible vulgarity, please go check out my best friend's erotic candy company, Randi Candies, at www.randicandies.com. The gummy boobs are delicious.

American Pie and Vodka... and I'm Not Talking About Tara Reid

Dear Tricia, I'm told my pie crusts are pretty good. But I ran into a recipe that calls for vodka! I know the alcohol would bake out, but why in the world would I even want to add it? (And if I was going to pick a booze to add, it would be tequila....)

Sometimes when I think I'm too much of a bad ass in the kitchen (or just too good at pretending like I am), I get an email like this that makes me think, "Wow. I really don't know!" So this was a fun one to research.
It turns out I'm not that behind on my baking skills, as this is a recipe that Cooks Illustrated (For those of you that aren't familiar, Cooks Illustrated is sort of like an awesome science magazine for recipes... everything is fool-proof and it never features Rachael Ray!) just developed last year that had most bakers scratching their heads. They suggested that you take half of the water in the pie crust recipe and substitute it with vodka. So, if your recipe calls for 1 cup of water, use 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of vodka. "But why in the world would you want to waste good vodka?", you ask. If you'd rather have a martini than a glorious flaky apple pie, then get out of the kitchen and go ahead and get back on Facebook. But if you're willing to donate the martini to the pie crust, then this recipe guarantees the flakiest pie crust you'll ever taste. Here's why:

1. Gluten doesn't form in alcohol:
What the hell is gluten? Well, if you're a loyal reader, you should know this. But if not (shame on you!), here's a brief overview: if you've over-worked your pie dough and then try to roll it out, its super hard to get it to roll without it springing back like a piece of elastic. That's because it has a lot of gluten in it. As a visual, pretend that water and flour are like... thanksgiving. And too much thanksgiving = elastic pants.
When you mix water and flour together and keep stirring/kneading/over-all-messing-with it, gluten forms. Gluten is a natural protein that makes baked goodies like bread chewy. But when you're making pie dough, you don't want a lot of gluten to show up at the pie crust party because it makes the crust end up chewy and tough. This can be avoided by not over-working the pie dough. You simply mix the water/butter/flour together until it just forms a ball and then refrigerate it. It's also a lot easier to roll out that way. But as an added bonus (I feel like I'm channelling Billy Mayes here), gluten won't form in alcohol. It's like magic! For some strange reason, gluten just hates alcohol and stays far far away.

2. The alcohol evaporates in the oven:
Lets play pretend again. Pretend you have a really soggy and wet pie dough that you put in the oven to bake. What you're going to take out of the oven in 45 minutes is a doughy, heavy, definitely-not-flaky pie crust. Not enough of the water evaporated out of the dough so it just stayed gross and soggy. But what alcohol does is evaporate completely in high heats. (The same thing happens when you cook with alcohol... you keep some of the flavor but the boozy stuff disappears.) So if you're taking half of your water and substituting it for alcohol, half of the liquid is guaranteed to evaporate, and some of the water will evaporate too. This makes a flaky, light pie crust.

So why use vodka and not some other delicious liquor? Vodka is the most odorless, tasteless alcohol, so it leaves a classic pie crust flavor without any other interference. But if you prefer tequila (or bourbon, like myself. Helloooo Woodford Reserve), why not use it? Have a little nip for yourself and then try it out and let me know what happens. Any other liquor will have more sugar, which means your crust might possibly brown more, but keep a good eye on it while its baking and use some foil to cover the top if it happens to get too dark.
Another helpful hint I learned from researching this recipe is that the dough can be a little more wet and difficult to work with, so try rolling the dough out in between pieces of wax paper or parchment paper to avoid bigger mess to clean up later. But if you're sampling the tequila while baking, a mess might be unavoidable anyway. And I support that.

Here's the recipe:

2 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon table salt
2 tablespoons sugar
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch slices
1/2 cup cold vegetable shortening, cut into 4 pieces
1/4 cup cold vodka
1/4 cup cold water

Procedure
1. Process 1 1/2 cups flour, salt, and sugar in food processor until combined, about 2 one-second pulses. Add butter and shortening and process until homogeneous dough just starts to collect in uneven clumps, about 15 seconds (dough will resemble cottage cheese curds and there should be no uncoated flour). Scrape bowl with rubber spatula and redistribute dough evenly around processor blade. Add remaining cup flour and pulse until mixture is evenly distributed around bowl and mass of dough has been broken up, 4 to 6 quick pulses. Empty mixture into medium bowl.

2. Sprinkle vodka and water over mixture. With rubber spatula, use folding motion to mix, pressing down on dough until dough is slightly tacky and sticks together. Divide dough into two even balls and flatten each into 4-inch disk. Wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 45 minutes or up to 2 days.

For similar blog entries, check out my archives under the titles, "Rootin' Tootin' Gluten" and "Whoever made up the phrase "Easy as Pie" was a Big Fat Liar."

I Burned my Bottoms!

Dear Tricia, The last time I baked cookies, the bottoms were burned. I followed the recipe and baked them for how long it told me to, but the bottoms were almost black. What happened?

Ahhh.... the ultimate What the Bleep Happened question... I love fix-its! So, you burned your bottoms, huh? Fortunately, this is easy enough to solve, so I'll try to keep the sarcasm and bitterness to a low since this dilemma is quite common. But keep in mind that I'd usually mercilessly make fun of you for at least 2 paragraphs.
First and foremost, your oven temperature may be incorrect. I know... its mean for an oven to tell you its at 350 degrees when its actually at 410, but this is all too common. But much like Republicans, ovens are frequently wrong and you have to learn how to deal with them on their own terms. But we'll save that as a last ditch effort. On to the more common fix its.
Are you using an old-school cookie sheet? You know... that dark and rusty one that your grandmother gave you or the one that your mom got at a garage sale and gave you when you moved into your first apartment? Cookie sheets that are aluminum (and a large chunk of older or cheap ones are aluminum) conduct more heat than stainless steel ones. Its like your oven is a dance club and your aluminum cookie sheet is wearing an outfit made entirely by Ed Hardy: It yields a hot mess of terrible results. Stainless steel is the way to go. In the restaurant industry, we call them "sheet pans" and you can buy stainless steel half sheet pans that fit beautifully in your oven and give you incredible results with baking. You can get two for like 20 bucks at Sam's Club. And if you're still getting burned bottoms, use both sheet pans and double them up.
When you get your beautiful new half sheet pans, you'll also want to invest in some parchment paper. Its something else that we in the restaurant business swear by. You can find it in the baking aisle of your grocery store near the aluminum foil and it also comes rolled up in a little box just like foil. Tear off a sheet of parchment paper to line your sheet pan. You can make it stick by lightly spraying some Pam on the pan. Parchment paper doesn't usually need to be greased when you're baking cookies, so just put your dough straight on the parchment and that should give you perfect cookie color on the bottoms, free of a burned mess.
Have you mixed your cookie dough entirely? While you don't want to over mix your dough (that makes it spread out and get flat), making sure that the sugar is fully incorporated is super important because big chunks of sugar that have fallen to the bottom of the cookie dough will burn. If you ever see burned streaks on the bottom of the cookie, its most likely from sugar that wasn't mixed in all the way.
Also, make sure you're putting your cookies on the middle or top shelf of the oven, further away from the heating element. This was a confusing topic of debate in one of my older blogs, "Top or Bottom: Which is Hotter?", but for cookies, get on top. This helps many different... situations.
Back to your oven temperature being wrong: if none of the previous helpers are working for you, then your oven isn't calibrated correctly. You could try buying an oven thermometer to check the real temperature of the oven and the adjust the temperature from there. But if you're broke like me (and that goes for you, Mr.-Judgmental-Convenience-Store-Guy-Who-Gives-Me-Dirty-Looks-For-Buying-Cheap-Wine), turn it down about 20 degrees and give it a go. I think you'll find that very helpful.

How to Win Friends with Flaccid Cheesecake

Dear Tricia, I make a delicious little cheesecake cup that comes in a phyllo shell. I love making them, and people love eating them, but what I hate is the mushiness of the shell after a while. Is there a way to keep those once crispy little shells from becoming flaccid?

Hey fancy pants, you sound too well-versed in a kitchen to be reading my blog. Phyllo cups and cheesecake? You're good. You're almost smug. I like you.
To start off with, lets explain what phyllo cups are, for those who aren't quite as savvy as your Martha Stewart-self. Phyllo dough (pronounced "feel-o", no "fy-lo." You know, like your Fila running shoes you wore when they were cool for about 2 weeks in the eighth grade? Say it like that.) is a very thin layer of dough that, when baked, gets very crispy and flaky. Its so thin, in fact, that it usually has to be baked in layers of a few sheets at a time, otherwise it just falls apart. Have you ever eaten that little delicious Greek piece of magic known as Baklava? That's got layers upon layers of phyllo dough.
The thing about phyllo dough is that its a little hard to work with because its very dry when it is unbaked. And when you bake it, that makes it even drier and crispier. And what happens to dry things around moisture? They suck it up like there's no tomorrow. Just like me right now: I have a ridiculous sunburn that makes my body suck up lotion really fast, and makes me really thirsty. Unfortunately for the burn, I'm sucking up Chardonnay instead, which is why I'll have to remember to spellcheck this later. Maybe twice.
So you have your crispy little baked phyllo shells with cheesecake inside them. Needless to say, they're going to suck up moisture from the cheesecake and get soggy. Now, how do you fix it? Just like my personality, the answer is simple, but only if you bake the cheesecakes before you put them in the shells. Bake your phyllo shells, empty. When they are cool, coat the inside with a little bit of melted chocolate. You can use your finger to do this: I won't tell. Pop them in the refrigerator for a couple of minutes, just until the chocolate hardens. Then you can take your already-baked cheesecake, and either spoon it into the shells, or take a small cutter and cut small circles of the cheesecake to put in the shell. The chocolate will make a hard barrier so that the cheesecake can't touch the phyllo to make it soggy. If it looks too sloppy for your liking (and it probably will, based on the tone of your voice in your smug question), just top it off with some whipped cream or berries. People f-ing love berries on their cheesecake. Seriously, in a retail bakery, you can charge twice as much for a cheesecake if you just throw a couple of blueberries on it.
If that doesn't answer your question because you're used to baking the cheesecake batter inside the phyllo shells, then I'm sorry but I don't have an answer for you because I can't defy the laws of physics. Anytime you bake something in a phyllo shell, its going to soak up moisture from the filling while it bakes and get soggy. That is, unless you fill the shell with a lovely sawdust filling or a careful selection of hairballs. But I'm pretty sure those won't go over too well at your dinner party.
And remember, when you hear someone mispronounce "phyllo," just do what I do and mercilessly make fun of their ignorance. I tend to upset people by always saying the wrong thing, so sometimes I like to just get it out of the way early. Happy cheescake-ing!
No, on that that spellcheck...

Why Butter and Eggs are the Axl Rose and Slash of Baking

Dear Tricia, Why do baking recipes always tell you to have your butter at room temperature? Does that really make a difference? Would butter go bad if you left it out?

Whoa whoa whoa... slow down! You've reached your 3 question limit and I'm not getting paid to write this blog. (Yet.)
While its not life and death, it definitely helps to have your butter at room temperature, mainly because when you add the eggs, you want them to emulsify with the butter, not separate or "break."
Basically butter is almost all fat and some water, and eggs have a pretty high fat content too. (It's a good type of fat, but it's fat.) When you add fat to fat and there's also water hanging out at the fat party, it doesn't really want to mix together well, or emulsify, which is when the water is literally suspended like a little Cirque du Soleil show inside of the fat and somehow it magically remains stable. Ideally, at least. This is hard to do sometimes: that's why people are scared of making Hollandaise sauce from scratch. (Either that, or they would rather just go to a restaurant and have someone else make it. I'm usually in that category.) There are a couple of things to do to emulsify the butter and eggs when you're mixing up your batter.
Temperature is the best way to manipulate butter and eggs into an emulsified, stable mixture. When they're too cold, they absolutely, under no circumstances, will ever come together. Ever. Never ever. Got it? Seriously, imagine cold butter and cold eggs being like Axl Rose and Slash. That magical Guns n Roses reunion will never happen in our lifetimes. So room temperature is a good. That goes for eggs too.
When you've creamed the room temp butter and sugar together and its time to add your room temp eggs, add them one at a time and let each one fully mix itself into the butter before you add more. The speed at which you add fat to more fat is the other key element to making things emulsify. Add it too fast and it will separate immediately. (I could totally make reference to the GnR song "Patience" here, but that's just too easy.) You'll know when this happens because the butter/egg mixture will start to look like it has little curds it it. While its no reason to start over again, it does affect the texture of the final product, so you want to try and avoid the weird little curds of failure by adding things sloooooowly. (And if it does separate, add a little bit of flour.)
And for your third question: no, butter won't go bad if you leave it out of the refrigerator. I'm a fan of leaving butter out all the time, actually, because its easier to spread on toast. Eventually, if you leave it out for like months and years and its August in Florida, then yes, it would eventually go rancid. But fat is a natural preservative and the butter will be safe to use in the time it takes you to use an entire stick, just make sure you keep it covered.

The Cupcake Vomit Dilemma

Dear Tricia, When I bake cupcakes, why do some of them rise unevenly? It's like there's a big bubble that always explodes out of one side and it doesn't look pretty. Please help me.

It almost looks like the cupcakes threw up on themselves, doesn't it? Ugh... I hate cupcake throw up. Luckily, there are some tips to trouble shoot so that your next batch vomits much less.
First and foremost, are the cupcakes vomiting only on one side? If so, it's probably your oven heating unevenly. A lot of ovens have "hot spots" and just heat up more on one side than the other. Make sure you're turning the cupcake pan a couple of times while it's baking.
Another possible cause for the cupcake up-chuck is not mixing in your baking soda (or baking powder, or both, depending on what recipe you're using) completely. While I'm not a huge fan of sifting (or doing laundry, or rum, or Jennifer Love Hewitt), its very important to sift the baking soda and the flour together so that it gets evenly dispersed into the batter. Otherwise, its very possible that you're getting a big chunk of baking soda in one part of the batter and of course its going to explode out the top of that cupcake.
Make sure you are not filling the cupcake liners too full. If the batter is all the way to the top, it has nothing to hold on to as it rises, so its more likely to lean to one side. Leave about 1/2" of space at the top of the liner for the cupcake to rise. Like me, it needs a lot of personal space and room to grow. Be nice to your cupcake and respect its wishes.
Lastly, when you fill your cupcake liners with batter, try to keep the batter as even as possible. Don't just dump a bunch of batter in there with some of it going all the way up to the top of the cup and one half barely covering the bottom. While this is probably the least likely reason for your dilemma, its still a possibility. I'm a fan of using an ice cream scoop because its easy to measure out each cup evenly, and you get a perfectly round dome to work with.
Happy Cupcake-ing. For some awesome decorating ideas, check out Amy Sedaris' book "I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence," where she completely bypasses the cupcakes and decorates herself in frosting and sprinkles. Genius at its best. (Besides this blog.)

Who ever made up the phrase "easy as pie," was a big fat liar.

Dear Tricia,
What's the secret to good pie crust? I've tried to make it from scratch before but it wasn't flaky like I wanted. What did I do wrong?

Oh, pie dough. It seems so simple and unassuming, doesn't it? 4 basic ingredients, a basically simple method... but it goes wrong so fast, just like Lindsay Lohan's career.
The trick with pie dough is that you have to use really cold ingredients. Let's go over the basics, and then I'll bust out some fancy science. Take a look at your average pie dough recipe:

1 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces
2 tablespoons solid vegetable shortening
3 tablespoons water

1. Mix flour and salt together.
2. Blend cold butter and shortening into flour until the butter resembles the size of peas.
3. Add water and knead until it becomes a dough.

Easy as pie, right? No. It's all wrong. These directions are going to give you really crappy pie dough. I think they're doing this on purpose so that you'll keep going back to the store and buying more cookbooks. I don't know who "they" are, but I'm sure they're mean and have beady little eyes. But back to the pie dough.
First of all, you don't want 1/4" pieces, you want more like 1/2" pieces. To get really flaky pie dough, you need large pieces of butter and shortening. Small pea-like pieces will give you more of a shortbread-like dough. And you didn't ask for that, did you? (Wait... let me check... nope, you asked for flaky dough. Just making sure I wasn't wrong.) With your hands, and not a mixer of any kind, just mix the shortening and butter into the flour and break it up so that the pieces are all covered with flour, and are BIGGER than peas. Work as fast as you can because you want the butter to stay cold and hard. If it gets too soft, just put the whole mix into the refrigerator for 10 minutes or so.
The water that you've measured out needs to be ice cold. Just take a glass of ice water and use the tablespoon to measure out the water from that. The colder the better because you don't want to soften the butter. When you're done mixing the butter into the flour, take your ice cold water and start mixing it into the bowl. Use your hands and gently form a dough, no kneading-necessary. The more you mess with it, the tougher your pie dough will be.
Once the dough is formed, let it chill for an hour, then roll it out, put it in the pan, and then let it chill again before you bake it. You can even freeze it before you bake it. The point is to keep the butter cold cold cold. Have I mentioned that yet? Once you bake the dough using this method, I guarantee you that it will be flaky as Janet Jackson was on her latest concert tour.
Want to know why you have to keep the butter so damn cold? Well, I'm so glad you asked! Butter is partially made up of water. When its super cold and then goes into a super hot oven, the water quickly evaporates and makes steam. The steam is what puffs up the dough and makes it light and flaky. If you were to take a room-temperature pie dough and put it in the same oven, the butter would just start to melt everywhere because its already so soft, giving you a soggy pie dough. Get it now? Super cold butter= super flaky pie dough.
And I have to address the shortening and butter combination because a lot of people ask me "Why not just use all shortening or all butter?" Because butter is so temperamental and you have to work hard to keep it cold, adding a little bit of shortening gives you a little more leeway to get a better dough. Shortening also makes it easier to roll out. And the reason why you wouldn't want to use all shortening is because that's just gross. Shortening isn't a real food that your body recognizes, it doesn't have the flavor of butter, and it leaves that weird coating in your mouth that sticks around for like 5 hours. Using it in moderation is fine (just like anything in your diet,) but stick with a mostly-butter pie dough for good flavor.

Uno, dos, tres... leches!

Dear Tricia, I was at an undisclosed location the other night and saw a "Cuatro Leches Cake." I thought, hmm . . . I've heard of Tres Leches, but Cuatro?? What's this new mystery milk? Better yet, what are all of the milks in these Mexican delights?

You know that U2 song, "Vertigo?" At the beginning he sings and counts "Uno, dos, tres, catorce." I've always wondered why he skipped counted 1, 2, 3, and then skipped 4 and went all the way to 14. Weird.
So lets talk tres leches cake. Tres leches means "3 milks" for those of you not fluent in the Espanol. It is a lovely Mexican dessert made with vanilla cake that is soaked in a sweet mixture of milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream, usually flavored with caramel. Its unbelievably good and when paired with a Big Mac value meal and a Pepsi Super Gulp, will most likely give you diabetes.
Cuatro leches cake is spanish for "4 milks." What's this elusive new milk, you wonder? Well, I looked up the recipe on the website for La Duni in Dallas, who are well-known for their award winning tres leches and cuatro leches cakes. They were very secretive about giving me any hints, but mentioned something called "arequipe sauce." So I looked further at other recipes that people had posted online. What I found is that cuatro leches is still soaked in the standard 3 milk recipe (again: regular milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream if you have short term memory loss from going to too many Widespread Panic shows), but is always finished with arequipe sauce.
To make arequipe sauce, there are two steps: boil an unopened can of condensed milk in a water bath for about 2 hours. When you open it (carefully so that it doesn't explode and leave you with a kitchen covered in shrapnel), the end produce is called "dulce de leche." You've probably heard of this before but didn't know how to make it. Now you do, thanks to me. After you cool the boiled condensed milk, or dulce de leche, you wisk in another 1/2 cup of regular milk to it, and it becomes arequipe sauce. Drizzle your tres leches cake with that and its officially cuatro leches cake.
Now if we could figure out why Bono skips so many numbers on the way to 14. Let me know when you've got the answer to that one.

Why we love muffin tops

Dear Tricia, Why do the tops of muffins taste so much better than the rest of the muffin?

Oh sweet Jesus... you've really asked a doozy of a question when it comes to food science. And as much as I love demystifying food science into terms that are easy to relate to and might make fun of a celebrity along the way... this one's tough. I'm going to try and make this as simple as possible.
First of all, its true that muffin tops taste better. They're moister and sweeter. When the muffin batter is baked, all of the starches in the batter become politely separated by water molecules. Water is like the hall monitor... or perhaps a crossing guard that keeps everyone in straight lines and makes sure they stay where the heck they need to be. The water stays there in nice straight lines and keeps those starches in straight lines too, separated from the other starches, because that's how the batter rises and stays risen. Unfortunately, once the muffin is baked, the starches like to go hang out with the other starches again, or "retrograde." So as they come together, they squeeze the water molecules up towards the top of the muffin. And guess what sugar is attracted to? Water. So the water gets squished out of the starches and migrates north, along with some of the sugar. In my mind, this makes a sound like when you squeeze air out of the sides of your mouth and it sounds like a fart. I know that's not what really happens, but it makes it a little more magic-like for me. So because water and sugar both hang out up top, that's what makes it moister and sweeter, tasting better than the rest of the muffin. The whole process of this is called "retrogradation." Try not to confuse that with "degradation," or "self-degradation," if you're me at a cocktail party full of couples.
Now, once you're telling this muffin top story to impress your friends, throw in some extra fancy terms like "amylose," "amorphous,", and "amylopectin." Don't worry about them knowing what they mean; no one knows that the hell amylopectin is. But if your crazy ex girlfriend Amy shows up and thinks you're making fun of her, then maybe you can "accidentally" confuse the act of "retrogradation" with "degradation." But it wasn't me who suggested that.

Baking Powder vs. Baking Soda: the Ultimate Fight

Dear Tricia, What's the difference between baking powder and baking soda? If don't have baking powder, can I use soda instead?

No, lazy bones. Go to the store and buy some baking soda. Even with our current economy, the price of baking soda hasn't gone up so it'll only set you back about 80 cents.
The difference is actually pretty substantial, even though they look so much alike. (Kind of like the kids from "High School Musical." I know they're supposed to be different people, but I just can't tell them apart. Call it being out of touch I guess.)
So lets start with baking soda. In order for any baked goodie to rise in the oven, it needs to produce carbon dioxide. Yeast in breads will produce carbon dioxide bubbles and help make the bread rise. But other leaveners like baking soda and powder need to make that happen too. Sodium bicarbonate is baking soda's real name and it is a naturally occurring salt. When you use it in a recipe, it immediately reacts with anything acidic (like buttermilk, or yogurt, or vinegar) to begin making carbon dioxide. That's why you can't leave a fully mixed batter with baking soda in it just sitting around for a while: it's already working hard for you and you're just letting it go to waste. You have to bake it immediately, slowpoke. Don't save it to bake tomorrow or it won't rise and you'll ruin Christmas.
Baking powder is a much different machine. It is baking soda and an added acid (in the form of a salt crystal, but that's extra info you don't need to know to impress people. Isn't that why you're reading this?) that reacts twice when you're baking. Hence, the "Double Acting" on the label. The first time it reacts with a batter, it starts making carbon dioxide bubbles immediately as it comes in contact with moisture, and then it reacts again when it gets heated up in the oven. Here it is, in a form that's easier to remember:

The Tale of Double Acting Baking Powder

act 1: Baking powder meets batter. They fall in love. Carbon dioxide bubbles form.
act 2: Things get hot in the oven. Carbon dioxide bubbles grow bigger and make the batter rise.

And, scene.

So, if you ran out of baking powder and you're wanting to use soda, go buy the baking powder. You can make a homemade single acting baking powder by mixing baking soda with cream of tartar, but chances are you probably don't have that one in your spice cabinet either. Refer to my "How did Diana Ross' hair get in my eggs?" post and find out why you need to go buy it too.

Box cake + sagging = worst baker ever

Dear Tricia, I am a really big fan of cheap box cakes. Especially the one that has the different colored rainbow sprinkles. But every time I make one the middle sinks in. Should I be embarrassed about my sagging problem? Please help.

Yes. You are officially the worst baker ever. What's worse than you being the worst baker ever is that you like cheap box cakes. Just fork over the extra 79 cents and buy the Duncan Hines brand already. You're embarrassing yourself.
That said, I can help you with your sprinkle cake conundrum. First of all, are you measuring everything correctly? I know its tempting to be all chef-like when you're baking and just throw in a pinch of this and estimate what a cup of that looks like, but with baking, you really do have to be exact if you're looking for the perfect sprinkle cake.
Do you live at high altitude? If you do, don't add as much water. A liquidy cake batter won't want to rise and stay risen. (See my pregnant cake post for an example of what proper cake results will look like)
Is your oven pre-heated? While a hot oven will force a cake into its submission and make it rise like no one's business, an oven that's not done pre-heating will basically just sip a cocktail, nudge your cake and ask, "Do you want to bake or what? Yeah, I didn't think so."
Make sure your pan isn't too big. It will definitely sag if the pan is too wide. Follow the directions on the back of the box and use their recommended cake pan size. My guess is that this is probably your problem: seeing as how you won't even buy the store brand cake mix, you probably don't want to fork over the dough for the right cake pan. Hey, I understand: times are tough. (cheapskate)
Last, when you are mixing the batter, bake it right away. Cake batter doesn't like to sit without being baked... it's on a mission to fill your belly. Let it do its job.
Just to be sure I didn't leave anything out, I checked the Duncan Hines website for cake baking tips, but after I read part that said "don't frost a warm cake" I knew they weren't going to be much help. And they weren't. They basically said half of what I said here but without the irreverent, judgmental humor. Where's the fun in that?
*UPDATE*
I forgot one of the most important baking rules ever!! Don't slam the oven door. When you're starting to get curious about how your cake is doing and you open up the oven door to check on it, close the door very gently. Shaking the cake before its completely baked just ruins the structure and collapsing is inevitable. Or, just look through the oven window instead of opening the door. Resist the temptation. Resist. The. Temptation.

Mom! Grandma's ruining Christmas again!

Dear Tricia, Will you please explain high altitude baking in a way that my grandmother will understand, and in turn, stop ruining the brownies?

So happy you asked because I used to be a pro at high-altitude baking when I was working in Telluride, CO. Oh, except for brownies: I could never master those. No, seriously... brownies at high altitude are a problem child, so take it easy on Grandma. In fact, I think that's why everyone in Telluride was so thin. It had nothing to do with the absence of fast food restaurants and healthy lifestyles. It was definitely the lack of brownie baking skills.

Are you ready for some math? Yeah, I'm not either. Let's make this as simple as possible: when you're baking at 5,000 ft above sea level or higher, take the leavener (the baking soda or baking powder) and just cut it in half. 1 teaspoon in Dallas is 1/2 teaspoon in Denver. That's the biggest part of high altitude baking.
Problem solved, right? Well, no, not exactly. A lot of brownie recipes don't have and baking soda or baking powder in them, so now what do you do? I went to Cook's Illustrated Test Kitchen website to see what I could find.

1. Turn up the oven temperature an extra 25 degrees.
2. Add an extra tablespoon of flour, per cup, to your recipe. For those of you who didn't pass the 5th grade (It's okay... I had a neighbor who didn't, and now I think he's a chairman of Google), if it calls for 3 and a 1/2 cups of flour, that means you're adding 3 and a 1/2 extra tablespoons of flour.
3. Add a little bit of cornstarch in with the flour. They don't specify how much, but I can't imagine it being anymore than a tablespoon or so.

If Grandma's brownies were as weird looking as mine were (all of the sugar rose to the top and created a nice top-crust of diabetes,) try reducing the sugar by 2 tablespoons per cup. Instead of giving you a math problem to figure that out, just do exactly what that says: take every cup of sugar that your recipe calls for and scoop out 2 tablespoons of it with a measuring spoon.

Hopefully this will help Grandma and her brownie dilemma. If not, here's a high altitude recipe I found from www.allrecipes.com:

* 7/8 cup all-purpose flour
* 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
* 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 3/4 cup butter, melted
* 1 1/2 cups white sugar
* 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* 3 eggs
* 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips (optional)
* 1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional)

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease an 8 inch square baking dish.
2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt; set aside. In a separate bowl, stir together the melted butter, sugar, and vanilla. Mix in the eggs. Gradually stir in the dry ingredients just until blended. Fold in chocolate chips and pecans if using. Spread the batter evenly in the prepared pan.
3. Bake in the preheated oven until the edges start to pull away from the sides of the pan and the top appears dry, 35 to 40 minutes.

This recipe got mostly good reviews from the readers on the website, except for a couple of people who are probably just miserable people to begin with. I hope this helps your Grandma and her brownies. Oh, and keep her away from the brandy while she's baking. I've found that helps too.