Recipes — baking tips

Top tips for baking the PERFECT, no-cracks, velvety smooth cheesecake. As far as I’m concerned, any baker should know how to make a decent cheesecake - they aren’t tricky to bake, but need a completely different treatment from sponge cakes or cookies. Here are my top tips, learnt over decades of trial and error.

Red velvet is a crowd-pleasing, impressive cake, but it can also be a little daunting, with lots of 'watch-outs'. The red food colouring makes the cake batter prone to splitting, and turns everything it touches red for the foreseeable future; a couple of grams over on the cocoa powder and the cake goes brown instead of a rich red; the cream cheese frosting has a tendency to turn to gloop at the very last minute for no apparent reason; and the list goes on.

HOW do you make your brownies SO FUDGY?! Call us crazy, but following HUNDREDS of requests, we’re caving and revealing our top secrets to baking perfectly dense, fudgy brownies. 6 tips, because that’s how many we had time for - might do round two later. ------------ Does your week need sweetening up? We'll help! Order yourself a box of the FUDGIEST brownies in the world (really, they are - take a look at our 5* reviews!). Click Here To Shop Brownies ------------ Use butter, not oil (and definitely not margarine!) Pick a recipe that uses proper butter, not oil.At room temperature, butter is...

My recipe for crunchy-on-the-outside, soft-in-the-centre chocolate chip cookies gets more visits than any other page on my blog, by a very long way. It probably gets more traffic than all the other pages combined. Get the recipe >> Crunchy On The Outside, Gooey In The Centre Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe Here’s how I get picture-perfect, TALL cookies, with a crunchy outside and gooey centre, every single time: 1. Freeze the dough This is super important - freeze the dough for at least 1 hour before baking. If they’re frozen throughout before being baked, it will take the heat from the oven longer to reach...