6 Bad Baking Habits You Should Break, According to a Professional Recipe Developer

For a lot of people, baking is a way to unwind and make something delicious to share with friends and family. But sometimes, even when you think you follow the recipe perfectly, your cake comes out with a giant sunken hole in the middle or your biscuits are flat and dry. What happened? 

Well first, make sure you are following a recipe that you know has been developed by a professional recipe developer or is from a trusted source. During my 10 years in the EatingWell Test Kitchen, we made sure that all of our recipes were tested on both gas and electric stoves and by at least two recipe testers to make sure the recipe would be successful for anyone who made it. However, if your baked goods still don't come out the way you thought they would, you might be making one of these mistakes. 

1. Relying on the Baking Time Instead of a Visual Indicator

When writing a recipe, we always include both timing and a visual indicator to let you know how to tell when your food is ready. And you’ll notice that the visual indicator comes first. For example: “Bake the cake until lightly browned around the edges and a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes.” What that means is that during our tests, it took 20 to 25 minutes for the cake to be lightly browned around the edges and a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake to come out clean. But all ovens work a little differently, so it’s best to rely on the visual indicator instead of just relying on the time. 

2. Not Adding Salt to Your Baked Goods

It might seem counterintuitive to add salt to something sweet, but salt enhances the flavor of food and balances the sweetness. But there is a sweet spot (yes, the pun is on purpose). Too much salt and your baked goods can come out tasting, well, salty. But not enough salt can make your baked goods taste flat. If your recipe doesn’t include salt, start with a pinch (or about 1/16 teaspoon if you want to be more precise) and see if it’s enough.  

3. Using the Wrong-Size Baking Pan

A well-written recipe will tell you exactly what size baking pan you should be using, such as a 9-inch cake pan or a Bundt pan. If you don’t have that exact type of pan, your baked goods will most likely come out looking different than the recipe intended, though it might be fine, depending on what you’re making. 

If you’re making a cake or brownies, it’s likely fine to use a different pan. If you use something larger than the recipe calls for, the batter will be thinner and thus cook faster. Or if you use a smaller pan, it’ll be thicker so it will take longer to bake. Either way, you’ll want to rely on those doneness cues instead of time. However, there are some pans that cannot be substituted, like a popover pan, madeleine pan or a tube pan for your angel food cake—so if you don’t have one of these, ask a friend or neighbor or be sure to pick one up before starting your recipe.

4. Not Having Your Butter at the Right Temperature

When it’s important, you’ll notice that recipes call for butter to either be softened to room temperature or cold. Softened butter allows for the butter to be incorporated smoothly into the other ingredients, often with sugar, in the process known as creaming. But if you’re making a pie crust or biscuit dough, you want to use cold butter so it stays in small pieces for flaky results. 

If you need to soften butter quickly, follow this hack from Nick Malgeri, the famed pastry chef and author of 13 cookbooks. Instead of placing a stick of butter on the counter and waiting an hour, he slices it into tablespoons and lays them flat on a plate at room temperature. You’ll have softened butter in 10 minutes.

5. Measuring Your Flour Incorrectly

Professional bakers always measure flour by weight. This is because a cup of flour measured with a measuring cup could be different every time you scoop it. At EatingWell, knowing that most people don’t have a kitchen scale, we use the spoon-and-level method. This means we measure our flour by scooping it up with a spoon into the measuring cup then using a knife to level the flour. Dipping the scoop into the flour can potentially yield more flour since the flour can get packed in the measuring cup. 

6. Using Substitutions That Don’t Work

We’ve all been there: you start a recipe and you are missing one ingredient. Sometimes you have a substitution that will yield a very similar result, like using yogurt instead of sour cream, or lemon-juice-infused milk for buttermilk. But other times, you don’t have anything close to what the recipe calls for or you try to omit the ingredient altogether. Maybe, just maybe, the recipe will work. But if it doesn’t, it isn’t the recipe’s fault. Be sure to use substitutions only when necessary unless you want the recipe to fail.