Joe’s Chocolate Recipes

I’m someone who finds merely following a recipe a bit dull. I tend to like improvising a little, cutting corners here and there, or altering seasonings to suit myself. I suspect many of us do similar things - we all like to put our own stamp on our efforts. I have, however, learned the hard way that baking doesn’t take kindly to this sort of cavalier attitude. Good baking requires (until you are familiar with the quirks of your subject, at any rate) a slavish devotion to the rules, a jobsworth attitude to getting things right, a certain precision.

My husband has sometimes, jokingly, called me the Igor of chocolate work, because of my endless experimentation. Time and time again, I have thought to myself - I wonder what this would taste like with that? Will this texture balance that one? Distressingly, the results sometimes have to be thrown away (throwing chocolate away - think of it!) since even the husband, who is a human dustbin if I ever met one, can’t bring himself to finish it. So, since I’m not a good example, I’ll have to be a horrible warning to others, as my grandmother would have said, and in this spirit, here are a few friendly warnings:

1. Cleanliness of equipment

Baking equipment generally has to be kept scrupulously clean - free of oil, free of any traces of detergent, free of any traces of what you previously baked, and completely dry. This is not like the treatment of a frying pan, which can (euphemistically, perhaps) be described as “seasoned” when it has a permanent light coating of oil.

2. Read the recipe carefully, then distrust it

I don’t know about you, but being a speed reader myself I have tended in the past to read recipes very fast, and then realise halfway through baking that I had missed the all important word which makes the difference between triumph and disaster. Nowadays when trying out a new recipe I read it through at least 3 times, mentally carrying out each process, before starting to get my equipment and ingredients out.

That said there have been times when I have slavishly followed the recipe and got a terrible result. I recall one occasion some years ago when I was attempting a crème brulee for the first time. I found a recipe that said “3 eggs” rather than “3 egg yolks” and thought, “oh goody, I hate separating eggs” and so tried it. The result was inedible, and I suspect it was the result of a proofreader who had no cookery experience. The famous cook who had endorsed the book shall remain nameless, but has somewhat lost my confidence as a result!

I often find it instructive to do a search for recipes when I’m trying something completely new - comparing recipes for a particular product helps me get a feel for how it is generally made, and helps me work out whether the recipe I am planning to use is typical of its kind.

3. Baking Terms

Cooking has a whole vocabulary of technical terms that describe how to process ingredients. They’re not interchangeable, as I discovered to my deep sadness once. If you’re not sure what a term means, for pete’s sake go and look it up rather than guessing, or you’ll be kicking yourself for the rest of the day. Here’s a very comprehensive dictionary of baking terms:

http://www.baking911.com/terms/baking_ab.htm

4. The importance of the ingredients

Unlike other kinds of cooking, baking really is all about the chemistry between the basic ingredients - in most recipes that’s largely the eggs, butter, sugar and flour. Delia has a great little article about how it all works here:

http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/baking/the-science-of-cake-making.html

As a general rule, the ingredients you use need to be the exact things specified in the recipe (you can’t substitute strong flour for plain, for example). That said, I think some cooks come across as a bit obsessive in this regard these days, requiring you to hunt down expensive and obscure ingredients in search of the “perfect” whatever-it-is. I don’t really hold to that philosophy, so if I can’t readily find the ingredient they ask for I will frequently do a little background research to see if other ingredients can be substituted. Occasionally of course this backfires, but then I’m the sort of person who thinks that of all the risks life throws at us, inedible or lacklustre food is likely to be the least of our worries. At the time of course, I find it very depressing when something goes wrong - there’s nothing like the horrors of having to do washing up for something you couldn’t eat to make one feel that life is a huge joke at one’s own expense.

Once you’ve tried a recipe, you can attempt to alter it slightly if you think it’s not working or you want to “improve” it, but you do so at your own risk. I strongly recommend that when you’re trying a recipe for the first time you stick exactly to the recipe - that way you get a feel for how it works (and whether you like the results) without wondering whether it was your fiddling around with the recipe that spoilt it! You can also use the opportunity to check things like how much a tablespoon of one ingredient weighs, or the total volume of the batter (and how far up the tin it comes before baking - very important, as different types of recipes use different amounts of the tin, dependant on how much the batter expands when cooking), so that you can make a note of useful information that will help you when you come to alter batch sizes or ingredient ratios.

However, once you leave the eggs, flour, butter and sugar behind, the other ingredients are less likely to be a problem if you play around with them. Ingredients like spices and flavouring oils are less crucial to baking success. You can alter those slightly with less risk that the result will be inedible (and of course, in many cases, this will help you ring the changes with a recipe, and give it your own unique twist).

However, there are a few exceptions to this general principle; chocolate is one of them - its high fat content means that if you’re feeling greedy for extreme chocolatey-ness, and you increase the amount significantly, the overall finish may suffer drastically. My advice is to check the fat content of anything you want to add to the recipe if you’re adding more than about 10 grams.

“Inclusions” (as they get called in the baking industry) like nuts or dried fruit are also fairly flexible - as long as there’s enough batter (that’s the flour, eggs, butter, and sugar mixture) to bind them all together. I suggest weighing out additional inclusions into a separate bowl first, and adding bit by bit to ensure you don’t end up with something unmanageable. However, if you significantly alter the total volume of the batter, you’ll find that it cooks differently to the original recipe - see my notes about size and shape and baking times and temperatures below.

5. Don’t mix your Measures

I’m “bilingual” when it comes to weights and measures. I learned to use metric at school (and have since used it extensively both at work and at home), but my mother always used imperial measures, and I find sometimes these seem more instinctive, so I use these almost as readily. However, the equivalents shown in recipes between metric and imperial measures are not exact, and you can’t weigh one ingredient in metric and another in imperial and expect to get good results. Most recipes will give you measures in both imperial and metric terms (and if you’re American they’ll also give you measurements in cups as well). Be aware that some American imperial measures can vary from British imperial measures (even though in many cases they use the same terms, like pint or fluid ounce) - see this webpage for more details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_weights_and_measures

It also pays to make sure that you’re weighing accurately. Buy good quality weighing scales and measuring cups, and look after them, and make sure you use them correctly. Don’t expect your scales to give you accurate results if you don’t use them on a level surface, for example, or where there is a very strong airflow (right under a working high powered extraction fan for example - on a digital scale you’ll see the figures wobbling back and forth as the scale tries to compensate and fails).

Some kitchen scales only display weights in 5g increments, which can make things a little awkward when scaling a recipe down to a smaller size, and some display in 1g increments, but aren’t very accurate. If you’re not sure that your scales give very accurate results, or if they only measure in larger increments, it may well be worth avoiding making very small batches of things, as irredeemable errors are more likely to crop up when you’re trying to measure very small amounts.

6. Size of tin and shape

Cast your mind back to science classes at high school, and what they taught you about the way different sized and shaped objects take more or less time to heat up and cool down. The gist of it is that smaller masses heat up and cool down more quickly, and that the larger the surface area in relation to the overall mass the quicker something heats up and cools down (e.g. pancakes heat up quickly, a big fruit cake takes a lot longer). The same thing applies to baking (one of the few examples of where the stuff you learned at school is actually useful). If the recipe requires a particular size and shape tray or dish, use it. If you alter it, you’ll find that it bakes in an entirely different fashion, and the results may be inedible (or at the very least, very disappointing). Having said that, it is possible to alter sizes or shapes of tins when you know what you’re doing, and here’s how:

First, and simplest. If a recipe calls for a round tin, and you only have a square tin, bear in mind this simple rule - in general, you can use a square tin that is about 1″ (2.5cm) smaller - so if the recipe calls for an 8″ (20cm) round tin, use a 7″ (18cm) square tin.

Alternatively, if you’re feeling lazy, and the difference in size is not particularly large (say an 8″ tin recipe going into a 7″ tin), you could just make the batter and discard the small amount you don’t use (or make a cupcake out of it). Don’t, for goodness sake do as I did once and try to squash it all into the tin - cleaning an oven of burnt-on cake mix is not a happy or productive way to spend an afternoon. Also, bear in mind, if you are making a giant cake for a party, for instance, that counter to most people’s first instinct, a 12″ tin is actually 4 times the volume of a 6″ tin, not double.

In general though, if you need to alter the size of a baking dish (for example when doubling up a recipe for a school fete) do it in a scientific fashion, and your results will at least be comparable to what was expected in the original recipe.

Tray Bakes
For tray bakes, measure the surface area of the tin or dish you intend to use, and work out the ratio between that and the area of the dish you’re supposed to use, and then multiply the amounts of ingredients by that ratio. That way you stand to get a reasonable result.
Here’s an example of how it works:

Most brownie recipes tell you to use something like an 8″ x 8″ (20cm x 20cm) tin. Because there’s only me and him at home, I find that makes a giant surfeit of them, so I use a 2lb loaf tin instead. So I measure the base of the tin with a ruler - it’s about 3¼” x 7½” (8.5cm x 19.5cm approx).

So (using metric for now to avoid the nastiness of working with fractions) I multiply 20 x 20 = 400cm². That’s the area of the base of the tin in the standard recipe. My tin is 8.5cm x 19.5cm = 165.75cm². So I divide the area of the larger tin by the smaller tin: 400 by 165.75 = 2.413273, which is the ratio between the 2 tin sizes. Then I divide all the ingredients by that ratio, so for example, 100g of plain flour becomes 41g. When you get to awkward things like eggs, see my notes below under section 6, which will show you how to calculate the weight of eggs, and work out how to substitute eggs of one size for another.

I find it helpful sometimes with recipes that have a large number of ingredients to use a spreadsheet to do all the calculations for me, which reduces the possibility that I make a silly mistake and spoil a batch. It also allows me to easily round all the results to the right number of decimal places to suit my kitchen scales. The other thing I use spreadsheets for is comparing recipes - I enter the details of the ingredients for each recipe and compare percentages of say, eggs or fat, to get an idea of how different each recipe is. I find this useful when I’m trying to develop a new recipe - because of my appalling lack of arithmetic skills I can be easily blindsided at first sight by different batch sizes into not realising that two recipes are virtually identical.

Cakes
In the case of cakes, you’ll actually need to take into account the volume of the tin, not just its area, so that you get an appropriate amount for the depth of tin (a 6″ tin is shallower than an 8″ tin, for example). One of the easiest ways of working this out is to fill two tins with water, and then pour the water into measuring jugs to work out their relative volume. Warning - this doesn’t work particularly well if you have loose-bottomed tins, though you may manage if you work really quickly before it all leaks out the bottom! Bear in mind that most cake recipes rise a fair bit, and therefore expect you to use a tin that has a larger overall capacity than the volume of your cake mix.

Some cooking websites include rough guides to total volume of cake tins, which can be very useful - but bear in mind that in these modern times you will find many use American measures, which are slightly different to British imperial measures (See this useful link for more details about the differences). Here’s a web page with some useful comparisons of pan sizes:

http://www.joyofbaking.com/PanSizes.html

7. Baking times and temperatures

Baking times as given in recipes are usually based on averages of how ovens behave, but every oven behaves differently. Gas ovens are different to electric, and fan ovens different again. If you have a lot of problems with your oven, buy an oven thermometer, as it may be that your oven is running hotter or colder than it should. There’s really no substitute for getting to know your oven. I find it helps to keep pencil notes in my recipe books against recipes I’ve tried giving the actual time I found it took me to cook something. It means I don’t overcook something twice because I’ve forgotten how it turned out the first time, and I am able to build up a picture, over time, of how my oven behaves. I also found it useful to get to know my oven’s instruction manual, and to read the recipe book that came with the oven - it gives me a feel for how the manufacturers expect it to behave.

Remember, if you alter the size or shape of your baking tin, this will have a huge knock on effect on baking times and temperatures. A square tin bakes differently than a round one (the corners can get dry or burnt if you’re not careful), and a long slender tin (say, like a loaf tin), bakes differently than a square tin. It really all depends on how large overall the cake or tray bake is, and how long the heat takes to get to the centre of the cake or tray bake. So a cake that is deeper (”thicker”) than the recipe originally intended will take longer for the heat to reach the centre of the cake, and hence longer to cook.

As a general rule, if you’re increasing the size of a cake or traybake, you will usually need to reduce the oven temperature slightly in order to avoid the product drying out - 10 or 20 °C will probably be enough in most cases.

If you’re making something significantly smaller, a good rule of thumb is to knock off about half to a third in cooking time, or at any rate, to start checking the batch about half way through the cooking time. If you’re doubling up a recipe, then as a general rule, increase the cooking time by at least 10 minutes (no, not double cooking time, strangely enough), and then start checking to see if it’s cooked. Because the depth is the same as the original, a large batch tray bake might not take much longer to cook, but a double sized fruitcake probably would take nearer double the time.

However, bear in mind that many recipes really do not like having the oven door opened while they are baking, and a few will just collapse irreparably. This is particularly true for the first half of the baking time - towards the end of the baking time, you’ve got more leeway. If you’ve got an oven with a light, try to position the cake so you can see it through the door, to avoid having to open the door to inspect it every five minutes.

8. Eggs and other oddities

All of this advice about altering recipe sizes is all very well, I hear you say, but what happens when I want to make something smaller, and suddenly discover I need a third of a medium egg, and I only have large eggs anyway? Well, all is not lost - most reputable recipes will specify the size of egg you need (or include the information in a glossary or introduction to a recipe book), and their size correlates to a small range of weights, which I’ve included as a table, below. Thus you can work out what the total egg weight in the recipe is, and then work out how many eggs of another size you can substitute. If it’s not a close correlation, for many recipes you can simply break the appropriate number of eggs into a bowl over a set of scales (for example 6 eggs if you need 5 and a half), stir the whites and yolks together gently (so that you’re not accidentally removing more yolk than white, for example), and then remove a few grams with a teaspoon to get the exact weight you need.

Fractions of a teaspoon or tablespoon are another annoyance (and another good reason to read the recipe through first). I find it useful to keep a notepad near the kitchen together with a calculator so I can work out conversions without having to rely on my almost non-existent mental arithmetic skills. Converting fractions to decimals is a pain, but fortunately most recipes stick to ½ (0.5 in decimals for us maths dummies), ¼ (0.25), ¾ (0.75), and occasionally ⅓ (0.33). I also find it extremely useful to have a full set of measuring spoons - mine go down as small as 1/32th of a teaspoon.

9. The age of the internet

Most of the advice I’ve put together here is the result of years of reading cookery books and experimenting (not always in that order, unfortunately). These days I find the internet a wonderful resource - there are a lot of keen cooks and bakers out there who freely share their knowledge, which allows amateurs like me to easily get an answer to an obscure technical point, or find a variety of recipes to compare for a classic product (like, say, brownies, or chocolate cake).
Here’s some of the websites I frequently visit:

http://www.practicallyedible.com/
This is a huge website - I find the most useful bit is their vast cooking encyclopaedia, which I regularly use.

http://www.ochef.com/
This is a site where you can submit questions about cooking issues and someone will research it and publish the answer for everyone to benefit from.

http://www.dianasdesserts.com/
This is a great example of a website put together by a very knowledgeable amateur - lots of little tips on a wide variety of subjects, plus a vast archive of recipes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/
A vast mine of information on many subjects, plus lots of recipes.

http://www.deliaonline.com/
Delia, as usual, has nailed it with a brilliant site with lots of information as well as loads of recipes. Sometimes I find her a little overbearingly authoritative in her attitude, but I guess she’s earned the right to be that way…

http://www.nigella.com/
Nigella not only makes great recipes, the way she writes them, you instantly feel enthused and empowered. Probably this is post-feminism at its best.

http://www.finecooking.com/
I like this website because they often accompany an article about how to make a certain foodstuff along with a series of related recipes (so, for example, 3 types of brownies - chewy, cakey or fudgey, are presented for your delectation alongside useful tips and thoughts about the subject). There are also lots of instructional videos and photos.

Of course, one of the best ways to research a cooking query these days, is to simply type appropriate search terms into Google or another search engine and you’ll be sure to find something relevant eventually, even if it is just another cook with the same unanswered query as you…

In conclusion:

While baking may be demanding, it’s always fun (except when you do the washing up, perhaps). Don’t be discouraged by the nay-sayers who would have you believe that it’s impossible to do baking without an enormous and expensive outlay on equipment, a vast amount of arcane knowledge, or some obscure and expensive ingredient. If it all does go wrong, remember that most bakers have had those moments of terror or depression where a recipe went wrong at the most inconvenient moment (even Delia, I bet), and that life goes on. And find a human dustbin (if you’re not one yourself) to hoover up the sunken cakes and slightly burnt cookies. But make sure you still get first dibs on licking the spoon - you are doing all the hard work, after all!