on the safe side, don’t store baking chocolate any longer than a couple of years.

Eventually baking chocolate loses its brown sheen as the fat migrates to the surface,

particularly if your storage area is quite warm. This doesn't affect quality, just appearance. As

soon as you melt the chocolate (or eat it), the remaining fat homogenizes readily in the mixing

bowl (or in your mouth).

Successful Baking

Baking is a very precise kitchen pastime. You can fiddle with some dessert recipes, for

instance, reducing the amount of sugar or eggs in a mousse, and you will still end up with a good

mousse of only a slightly different flavor or consistency. Not so with pastries, cakes or cookies.

Altering the ingredients just may produce something only good for a hungry goat (goats eat

anything). Tampering with the proportions of sugar and fat affects how the raw material is going to

behave in the complex chemical and physical process of baking.

What a good recipe does is give you the correct proportions, based sometimes on centuries

of trial and error, modified only slightly by knowledgeable and patient contemporary bakers to

compensate for modern ingredients and changing tastes.

Serious bakers and professionals use the most accurate means to get exactly the right

amount and proportion of ingredients, not unlike chemists in their laboratories. They avoid

measuring cups as not accurate enough, and use fine kitchen scales instead to obtain the precise and

consistently reproducible amounts. They measure by weight not only flour, sugar, cocoa and nuts

but liquids and even eggs. A large egg, for example, should be exactly 2 ounces (55 g) but they are

not always so. When a recipe for a torte calls for 8 large eggs, you want 16 ounces (455 g) not 15 or

17 ounces (425 or 480 g). The one once (30 g) difference may be critical for perfect result. No

wonder serious pastry baking turns off so many cooks.

Modern food science is now coming up with the reason for those exact ratios and

specialized techniques prescribed in recipes. Here I'll go through some of the basics. If you are

already beyond these, invest in a good book on baking, one that includes more than recipes. It is

helpful to understand why you are doing something, not just doing it because the recipe says so.

Temperature of ingredients

Most cookbooks say to start with ingredients at room temperature. They are right, but why?

Butter or other fats form an emulsion (a stable suspension of liquid in fat) with sugar and eggs. It

just so happens that you create the optimum emulsion at room temperature, 70°F (21°C).

Plan ahead and take butter, eggs and any other chilled ingredient from the refrigerator to let

them warm up. If you must use butter right out of the refrigerator, cut it up into small chunks and

place it in your mixing bowl. Turn the oven on for about two minutes, then turn it off. The

temperature of most oven should be around 90°F (30°C). Put the bowl and butter in the oven. In less

than half hour the butter should be close to room temperature. Check it once or twice, you don't

want to melt it—melted butter will not cream even after it has cooled down. If you know your

microwave well, that may be a good place to warm up butter. But most tend to partially melt them.

When you have to cream your butter with sugar, a suggestion from a baker to remedy cold

butter works well, too. Heat the sugar in a saucepan until quite warm but not hot. Mix chunks of

cold butter with the sugar and in no time the butter is soft enough to cream.

Eggs are easier to deal with. Plop the unshelled egg into a bowl of very warm water. It takes

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