5 Rules for Improvising When Baking

Dig into the comments on the Epicurious recipes, and one thing is immediately apparent: Epi readers love our recipes, but even more, they love to deviate from them. Whether it's adding more brandy towhipped cream, throwing a handful of peanut butter chips into acookie batter, or cutting back the sugar in acake batter or glaze, our readers—and most cooks—love to make a recipe their own.

I, too, am a deviator. Although I develop recipes that I hope will be closely followed, when I bake myself, I'm constantly playing the rogue card, adding this and that to a recipe without much worry. This, it's important to note, is for two reasons: 1) I've been baking for a long time, so I understand how the fundamental ingredients in a recipe interact and how changing them might affect the recipes, and 2) I'm totally fine baking up a lopsided situation and serving it to my guests with the aside, "Hey, I tried something new and it doesn't look perfect, but it tastes pretty good."

I recently broughtsuch a caketo a dinner party, but this was no lopsided situation: therecipeI had fiddled around with, changing and adding ingredients, still turned out a spectacular result. This surprised my friends, who—between bites of cake—told me how afraid they are to improvise when baking.

And they have good cause: baking is a science, with each ingredient playing a key part to create the structure, flavor, and color of the end result. Make one small change, and the whole recipe could fail. You might want a less sweet cake, but use less sugar and the texture of the cake will be different. You might want to add nuts, but those nuts could add extra oil, meaning the batter will bake differently. Or you might want to increase the lemon flavor, but the acid might react with the eggs, turning the cake gooier (or drier).

So yes, baking improv seems onerous. But it's not impossible. I reached out to two of the biggest #BossLady bakers I know,Baking Bible author Rose Levy BeranbaumandFlavor Flours author Alice Medrich, to get their go-to tips when it comes to bending the baking rules. Follow these guidelines and you, too, can bake with reckless abandon (kind of).

Both Beranbaum and Medrich agree: The first rule of bending baking rules is starting with a recipe you know works. If you start with a recipe you've never made before, and then try and change something, you won't know what went wrong. Instead, it's best to start out with something you know and love. "Start off following a good recipe pretty exactly, so that when you start to make changes, you can figure out how those changes are affecting the final product," says Medrich. "That's the deduction part of being experimental and creative."

准备好开始即兴创作?第一次交换Medrichsuggests is the main inclusions, such as nuts, seeds, chocolate chunks, or dried fruit. For a thick cookie dough, dense banana bread, or brownie batter, swapping these items in, out, or around is generally okay, because the batter will hold the ingredients up while baking. For a lighter cake batter, these inclusions might work, says Medrich, or they might fall to the bottom of the pan, creating an upside down-type cake, depending on the cake's structure. (FWIW, a nutty upside down cake still sounds delicious to me.)

But you still have to be careful, as one of Beranbaum's trusted recipe testers found. "She substituted dried cherries for raisins in the Hungarian raisin and walnut tarts, and the filling overflowed," Beranbaum explains. "This was because dried cherries don’t absorb liquid as well as raisins." Another thing to consider: some nuts have more oil than others. For example, Beranbaum says she would reduce a small amount of the butter in an almond cake recipe when swapping in pecans (the nut with the highest oil content) for almonds.

Another simple switch to make is with flavoring and spices. Swapping orange zest for lemon will change the flavor but isn't a big structural change. Mixing up, or adding in spices, is also a good way to play around with flavor. Just use your best judgement when using spices. "If you were going to put the same amount of clove as cinnamon, it would be inedible," explains Beranbaum.

When you're ready to make more serious alterations to a recipe, Medrich and Beranbaum suggest starting out small, adjusting one ingredient, such as the sugar or fat, at a time. "Start out gradually, with a reduction of 10-15 percent," says Medrich. "If that works, you can stop, or you can keep going."

And keep notes. Just like we keep detailed testing notes of our recipe trials in the Epi Test Kitchen, keeping note of the changes you make at home will help remind you what you liked, and what you didn't.

While most cooks make changes to alter a dessert's flavor, some bakers want to streamline the recipes to be easier or faster. This is a riskier type of recipe alteration, but there are few things you can try.

Medrich and Beranbaum both agree that sifting isn't always necessary. In fact, "sifted flour" is usually only called for in order to standardize measuring: because many bakers don't weigh their ingredients, unsifted flour will be more compact, while sifted flour will be more aerated and light. For most recipes, such as cookies, brownies, pie crust, and layer cakes, it's totally cool to skip the sifting, and simply fluff up your flour with a fork before measuring. For cakes where the end result is hopefully as light a texture as possible, like a sponge cake, sifting is important, to keep the flour aerated and to quickly mix it into the batter.

Another step Medrich always skips: greasing and flouring parchment paper, rather than pouring the batter directly onto the non-stick parchment."That's one," she says, "just makes me crazy."