No doubt you are constantly reminded how good your mother’s cakes are at dinner parties. She never even used a recipe apparently, and the story may also suggest that she never even ever measured anything!

Well, by following guides such as this, you too can be come a super human cake baker and who knows, eventually your measuring cups could be as redundant as your mothers.

When you start making a cake, the preparation is absolutely vital. It is firstly important to preheat the oven in order to ensure that baking times will be accurate. You can even use a thermometer if you wish, this will make everything more accurate.

You also need to properly prepare the containers you will be using. Most items that you bake require a dish to either be greased or floured and greased. So grease a pan, why not use a towel or pastry brush to apply a nice thin even covering. You might want to try using solid vegetable shortening, the flavour won’t seep into your cake.

If a recipe calls for greasing and flouring a pan, grease the pan as usual and then shake to ensure all surfaces are evenly covered. Once you are done turn upside down to remove excess flour.

Don’t substitute ingredients unless the recipe lists alternatives, and try and make sure you have the right sized tin before you start. When you are a little more experienced then you can mess about with quantities and ingredients, but for now lets not destroy it before it’s even gone in the oven! Now, a quick note to the health conscious, if a recipe calls for butter, for goodness sake use it.

Be careful measuring ingredients and remember a cup of liquid does not have the same volume as a cup of dry ingredients. So if you use a dry measure for liquids, you will have less, you will only have 2/3 cup when you need 1 cup.

It is always best to use a clear standard liquid measuring cup. Place the cup on a level surface and fill to the desired mark. hold it up to eye level to check the level. With dry ingredients, spoon the ingredients into a proper cup and level it off with a good knife. Measuring margarine or butter is easy, as the wrapped sticks are marked for each tbsp. Dry measure cups are also used for sour cream, yogurt or whipped cream.

Along with liquid and dry measuring cups, you need a set of measuring spoons. Fill the spoon with dry ingredients and don’t forget to level it off. Liquids can also be measured in these spoons. Just fill the spoon to the top.

You can always go online and discover charts that will show you the metric and imperial equivalents of both liquid and dry measures. Some sites also have live calculators to convert measurements for you. These same website calculators also tend to include instructions for how to halve or double a recipe and oven temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius scales.

If you live in Denver or other high altitude destinations the temperatures may have to change, there are charts that can give you these adjustments. Cakes, biscuits and muffins, cookies etc will all have slight altitude adjustments.

If your son or daughter has recently graduated, why not use the skills you have learnt here and make them a really special graduation cake?

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