Easy Brown Sugar Substitute

We’ve all been there: you’re making a recipe and realize you don’t have an ingredient. It’s the worst – especially if you don’t want to go to the grocery store (again). It’s nice to know some easy baking substitutions when this happens. A lot of ingredients you bake with regularly can be made at home or substituted with something different.

This recipe will tell you how to make a substitute for brown sugar – with just 2 ingredients!

2 Ingredeints Needed

Homemade brown sugar is one of the things you can make at home! It’s easy to do with just two ingredients:

• Granulated Sugar – also called white sugar
• Molasses – unsulferd molasses is best

How do you make brown sugar?

• Simply add 1 tablespoon of molasses to 1 cup of white sugar and stir. This will create a light brown sugar substitute!
• For dark brown sugar, simply add more molasses.

Why Do You Heat Treat Flour?

If you’ve ever made edible raw cookie dough, you might already know that you shouldn’t use eggs, but did you know you shouldn’t use raw flour either? Luckily, there’s an easy way to bake flour, so it’s safe to use in all of your favorite edible raw dough recipes. I’m showing you how to do it!

The process of making flour does not kill bacteria. Usually, this is not a problem because flour in recipes is cooked, whether in cakes, cookies, breading, etc. The heat kills the bacteria, so there isn’t a worry. Raw flour can harbor the same kinds of bacteria, and so it needs to be cooked.

Luckily, it’s super easy to heat treat flour, so it’s safe to use in edible cookie dough recipes, which are one of my favorite things! It takes all the worry away from using raw flour and only takes about five minutes. 

How to heat treat flour

• Preheat the oven to 350°F.
• Spread the amount of flour you need for your recipe on a cookie sheet.
• Once the oven is heated, bake the flour for five minutes.
• Cool it on the sheet before adding it to your recipe. 

Tip: You can bake flour ahead of time. Once it’s cooled, store it in an airtight container so you can use it later.

1. How do you double when baking?

For most baking recipes, you can simply double the ingredients. Eggs, flour, sugar, butter, even vanilla extract, can be doubled for almost any recipe you make. Just times the amounts by 2 – and be sure to do it for ALL the ingredients (don’t forget!)

Tip: do the calculations (write down the new measurements) before you get started so you don’t accidentally forget to double one of them.

2. Know your fractions

Don’t worry, if that makes you break out into a sweat thinking about 3rd grade. I have a FREE printable for all the fractions, and they’re also listed here. Use this as your guide for doubling any recipe. These are the most popular two questions asked about fractions, so I’ll highlight them:

3. Know if your mixer/bowl is big enough

Depending on what you’re doubling make sure your bowl or mixer can hold it all. If not, just make the recipe twice.

4. Working with doubled dough

If you’re making a yeasted dough or a rolled cookie, make sure to divide the dough in half before working with it. A doubled recipe can get pretty big and will be hard to roll out or knead.

5. Don’t double the spices right away

When you’re doubling a baked recipe, you can simply double any cinnamon or spices, even baking soda or powder (more on that later). However, when you’re cooking it’s a different story.

6. Cooking and baking time will be different

When you double a batch of cookies it doesn’t take double the time to bake them, it just makes more of them. Doubling a cake will make it take longer to bake, but it won’t double the time.

7. Know the right size pan to use

When doubling a baking recipe, you’ll need to be sure and use the correct pans. Sometimes you can substitute a bigger pan and sometimes you’ll just need additional of the same size pan (i.e. when you’re making a layer cake). Check out my pan size equivalent post to know what size pans to use.

8. Do you double baking powder or baking soda?

For simple doubling of recipes (you’re making two batches of cookies instead of just one) then yes, it’s fine to double the baking powder or soda. But if you’re really scaling up a recipe you’ll need to adjust the amount.

What are the types of chocolate?

There are so many different kinds of chocolate for baking: baking bars, chocolate chips, melting chocolate. This post is going to talk about what they all are and what they’re good for.

The one chocolate we won’t talk about in this post is cocoa – read my entire post about cocoa here.

Flavors of Chocolate for Baking

Flavors of chocolate are all about percentage, that is, the percentage of cacoa vs sugar.

• Unsweetened Chocolate which is 100% cacao and no sugar. You don’t want to eat it plain!
• Bittersweet Chocolate, which is around 70% cacao and 30% sugar (also called dark chocolate).
• Semi-Sweet Chocolate has around 60% cacao and 40% sugar and is also called dark chocolate.
• Milk Chocolate has under 40% cacao but also contains milk fats and sometimes vanilla.
• White Chocolate has no cacao at all and often isn’t considered “real” chocolate!

Baking Bars

Also called baking squares, baking bars are chocolate you use for baking. These aren’t usually bars you’d eat (i.e. a candy bar).

Baking bars are usually melted and added to brownies or other recipes.

You’ll find baking bars in the baking aisle of the grocery store, usually on the top shelf. They come in Unsweetened, Semi-Sweet, White and often German Chocolate (which I think of as close to milk chocolate). The mainstream brands you’ll find in regular grocery stores are Bakers and Ghiradelli.

Baking bars are great for melting and adding to recipes or chopping and adding in place of chocolate chips. They’re also great for dipping chocolate covered strawberries or shortbread, etc.

Recipes using baking bars:

• Brown Butter Brownies
• Chocolate Chess Pie

Chocolate Chips

Chocolate chips are the most common form of chocolate. These are sold in the baking aisle and come in lots of different flavors, and they often come as “chunks” instead of chips.

There are too many brands of chocolate chip to list, but I highly recommend buying one of four brands: Ghiradelli, Guittard, Nestle, or Trader Joe’s. I do not recommend store brand chocolate chips – especially if you’re going to melt them.

Chocolate Chips have a stabilizer in them to keep them from melting completely in the oven – that’s what makes them stay chips – and when they are melted they tend to be a bit cloudy, so they’re not recommended for dipping or bark or things like that.

When adding chocolate chips to recipes, most of the time the flavor doesn’t matter. As long as you’re not melting the chocolate chips into a recipe (i.e. ganache) you can use milk, semi-sweet, bittersweet and white chocolate chips interchangeably in recipes.

Chocolate Chip Recipes

• Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
• White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies
• Triple Chip Pumpkin Cookies

Melting Wafers/Candy Melts

There are two different kinds of melting wafers: chocolate and colorful.

Chocolate Melting Wafers are small disk-like pieces of chocolate that are preferable for melting (over chocolate chips) because they have no stabilizers in them. These are great for dipping truffles and candy or whenever you need to melt chocolate for baking.

Mostly they come in semi-sweet and white chocolate flavor and are sold in the baking aisle of the grocery store where you find the baking bars.

The most common melting wafer you’ll find is Ghiradelli brand (or store brands, if you’re shopping at Walmart). They come in pouches or sometimes a contained cup you can melt in.

Do not confuse chocolate melting wafers with the “chocolate” melts you get in the craft aisle or at the craft store (i.e. Wilton brand). While those melts do have a chocolate “flavor” they aren’t chocolate in the sense of the kind you find in the baking aisle.

Chocolate melts are more often colorful and perfect for making candy or truffles when you want that colorful exterior – but the flavor isn’t deep and rich like true chocolate. If you’re making something chocolatey – stick to the kind in the baking aisle.

Use Chocolate Melting Wafers for:

• Reese’s Dipped Pretzels
• Haystack Cookies

Almond Bark or Candiquik

Also in the baking aisle are large blocks of chocolate that are engineered for melting and dipping, often referred to as almond bark.

Almond Bark isn’t a thing – it’s a brand. Same with Candiquik – these are brands of melting chocolate. These products are perfect for dipping truffles and pretzels, etc., because they melt smooth and without issue.

These blocks are on par with the melts described above, but just a different shape.

You’ll also see store brands of this as well. All of them live on that top shelf, alongside the melts and bars.

Of all the block melting chocolate like these, Candiquik is the best tasting, Almond Bark second. Don’t even bother with the store brand! Candiquik also comes in a handy tray you can use for melting.

Moral of the story: Almond Bark (and candy melts described above) are for decorative or coating purposes. Don’t chop it up in your cookies; these chocolates are engineered for dipping.

Recipes using Candiquik:

• Cheesecake Truffles
• Drunk Cherries

Easy Ways to Pit Cherries

So you’ve brought home a bunch of fresh cherries and want to make cherry pie filling, or maybe you just want to enjoy a bowl and not worry about the pits. If you don’t have a special tool then you’ve found the right place.

Today I’m going to teach you my favorite way to pit a cherry without a tool – using a straw. But I’ll also talk about a few other easy ways you can go about removing the pits.

How to pit a cherry with a straw

Tip: use a metal straw or a strong plastic reusable straw. Disposable ones are too flimsy, so I use a straw that comes with one of those reusable cups you get at Starbucks or that comes with your water bottle.

In my opinion, this is the best way to pit cherries if you don’t have a tool.

• First, remove the stem.
• Place the straw over the cherry where the stem was.
• Hold the cherry in one hand and the straw in the other and press the straw through the cherry. It will pop the pit right out!

What is yeast?

Yeast is a living single-cell microorganism that is all around us. Ancient Egyptians are credited for discovering yeast when wild yeast found its way into their ancient bread dough and, like magic, the dough puffed up or “leavened” all on its own creating a lighter, fluffier and more delicious bread. Prior to that “bread” was hard and flat. Imagine how happy that discovery was!¹

Since that discovery, bread makers figured out ways to cultivate yeast and use it to make more delicious types of bread often through the use of starters which are commonly used in artisanal baking today.

As science progressed smart people figured out how to make different types of baking yeast shelf-stable and reliable which resulted in those little packets and jars of dry yeast you see in the grocery store.

What does yeast do?

Like all living things, yeast needs to eat to survive and when it’s used in dough it likes to munch on the sugars. If no sugar is available the yeast will consume starches, alcohol (hello, beer brewing!) and other things and turn it into sugar (also known as glucose).

When it processes the sugars, yeast produces carbon dioxide and ethanol gases which, in turn, is responsible for the rise, or leavening, of the bread. Without yeast a loaf of bread would not be a loaf but flat and hard and not as appetizing instead.

Yeast needs the right environment to create the best possible baked good and so the type of yeast, how it’s “proofed” or activated, the amount of sugars available for it to grow and air temperature are just a few of the variables that can affect how well yeast works.  

Types of Yeast for Baking

There are many kinds of yeast used for different purposes so we are focusing on types of baker’s yeast as that’s what is commonly used for home baking. 

We are focusing on dry yeast, which is what you find at the grocery store and the type of yeast I use for all of my yeast recipes on this blog.

• Active dry yeast is most commonly used in home baking and is sold in either small packages or little jars at the grocery store. The actual yeast is stored in the granules and is reactivated when combined with warm water. 
• Instant yeast is like an amped-up version of active dry yeast and packaged the same way. It has a higher concentration of active yeast and doesn’t require activation with water. Instead, it can be mixed into the dough without being activated first. If you compare it with the dry active yeast, you’ll notice the granules are smaller. Instant yeast is sometimes referred to as rapid-rise yeast and is often used for bread that is made in a bread machine.
• Bread Machine Yeast is another type of instant yeast that has smaller granules so that it will dissolve quicker with the wet ingredients and doesn’t need the proofing step. It often has a longer shelf life than other yeast.

How to Knead Dough

If you’ve gone to the trouble to buy the right kind of yeast for your recipe, activating the yeast according to the instructions and mixing all of your ingredients to make the dough it’s a good idea to know how to knead the dough. 

Kneading the dough is a crucial step in baking as it changes structure of the dough so the yeast can do it’s part in making the bread rise. Depending on the recipe there may be specific kneading instructions but, in general, this is how you knead bread:

• Place the dough on a worksurface dusted with flour.
• Gather up the dough and, using the heels of your hands press and stretch the dough away from you.
• Fold it back on itself and press and stretch again. Every so often turn the dough so you are pressing and stretching the whole ball of dough.
• You know when you’ve kneaded the dough enough when it’s no longer sticky and the dough has an elasticity.

Kneading the dough lengthens and stretches the gluten in the dough giving it structure. When the dough rises this structure creates space for the yeast to emit the gases that causes the bread to rise. 

Where is the Best Place to Let Dough Rise?

The best place to let dough rise is a warm place. Most often your kitchen counter is the best place, but if your kitchen is cold it’s better to find a warmer place to leave it. At least 80 degrees F is the ideal temperature, but if it’s cooler it will just take a little longer for the bread to rise. If it’s very cold a warm oven is a good place, too, but just be sure to monitor the temperature.

Your recipe, if it’s a well written one, should indicate what the dough should look like since the amount of time for the dough to rise will vary based on what the temperature of your kitchen is. “Doubled in size” is a common visual cue, but always check your recipe instructions to be sure.

Why didn’t my bread rise?

• Is your yeast expired? Always check the expiration date on the package before you use it.
• If your yeast wasn’t expired, was it in an opened package exposed to moisture and air? Yeast is perishable and will go bad quickly if it’s been exposed to too much moisture and air so even if it’s still within its expiry date it can go bad if not stored properly.
• Expired yeast means the yeast has died. When you activate the yeast, you should see bubbles and foam form in the bowl of water (if using active dry yeast). If this doesn’t happen it’s probably because the yeast has gone bad.
• Was your water too hot when you activated the yeast? Water that is hotter than 139°F can kill the yeast. If other ingredients in your dough are hot they can kill the yeast, too (looking at you, melted butter).
• Did you use the type of yeast called for in the recipe? Remember, different kinds of yeast are not always interchangeable.
• Did you forget to add any ingredients in the recipe? Or did you miss measure? Yeast needs the right environment in order to work and so any changes in the recipe amounts can impact how it reacts.
• Did you knead the dough enough? The gluten in the bread needs to be worked so that it has structure. Dough that is not kneaded (or not kneaded enough) does not have the right structure and won’t work right with the yeast to get a nice rise (or any lift at all).