Introduction
I've never been good at baking. I've learned from my mum and grandma how to cook big meals to feed the entire family, but never how to make a pudding from scratch.
In Sicily, where I'm from and where all my family still live, we've got plenty of amazing patisseries that bake delicious fresh goodies on a daily basis, and you don't feel the need to bake anything yourself as you can quickly pop down the shop and buy a big tray full of all sorts of pastries at an affordable price.
When I moved to England a few years ago and started watching all these interesting programs on television about how to bake the perfect pudding, Master Chef, Great British Bake Off, etc. I finally decided to give it a go and bake my first cake... what a disaster!! I didn't have a particular recipe to follow, but I remembered more or less what ingredients I needed to use but not the quantities. The cake was absolutely awful!!
Just remember: Pastry is like Chemistry - you MUST follow the basic recipe if you want it to work. You can always add extra ingredients to your recipe to give it a different twist, such as vanilla extract, cocoa powder, lemon zest, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, ground cloves, nuts, etc., but if the main ingredients are wrong - I mean the wrong quantities - then the result may be very poor.
Remember, the ingredients that you must always get right and weigh before start baking are: flour, baking powder, sugar, egg, butter.
In Sicily, where I'm from and where all my family still live, we've got plenty of amazing patisseries that bake delicious fresh goodies on a daily basis, and you don't feel the need to bake anything yourself as you can quickly pop down the shop and buy a big tray full of all sorts of pastries at an affordable price.
When I moved to England a few years ago and started watching all these interesting programs on television about how to bake the perfect pudding, Master Chef, Great British Bake Off, etc. I finally decided to give it a go and bake my first cake... what a disaster!! I didn't have a particular recipe to follow, but I remembered more or less what ingredients I needed to use but not the quantities. The cake was absolutely awful!!
Just remember: Pastry is like Chemistry - you MUST follow the basic recipe if you want it to work. You can always add extra ingredients to your recipe to give it a different twist, such as vanilla extract, cocoa powder, lemon zest, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, ground cloves, nuts, etc., but if the main ingredients are wrong - I mean the wrong quantities - then the result may be very poor.
Remember, the ingredients that you must always get right and weigh before start baking are: flour, baking powder, sugar, egg, butter.
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