Tricks and Recommendations

In this post I would like to share my opinion on ingredients and methods, but also help you to find the right products.

Chocolate: It is worth to invest once in a big chocolate. I bought this 2.5kg chocolate for about £15 and if you calculate how much is to buy it in100 g bars you realise it is well worth it. It is top quality chocolate and costs £0.60 per 100 g, cheaper than the basic, cheapest chocolate in the supermarkets.

Favourite book: This book was one of the first one I bought, since then I used it dozens of time....This is the book if you have only one, have this:

It has been reprinted many times and it has been published at many titles, just look for the colourful spots. It contains many cooking and baking recipes...well 1000 in total. All recipes has colourful pictures, and the main thing is: all recipes are tried and tested. EVERYTHING I cooked or baked from this book turned out exactly the same as on the pictures and tasted divine. It contains recipes for: Starters, Mains and Desserts with options for :vegetarian, quick, crowd quantity, healthy and hearty.

And the best thing is: I bought it from TheBookPeople for £ 10, but you can also buy it on Ebay of Amazon.

Food Colouring: Since I baked a "red" velvet cake, that turned out brown, I ditched the supermarket ones....they don't worth a penny.

The best food colouring in my opinion, is the Sugarflair paste edible gel ones. You only have to use a tiny amount, like the amount of pink on the match. They cost about £2-2.50, but worth every penny. You can buy them from Ebay, other on-line cake stores or at you local cake lady!s shop. 

Food ring/dessert ring

At the Individual Strawberry Cake recipe I needed 4-6 dessert rings to create some individual cakes but not the mini ones. What I used is a very cost effective method. I bought 5 tinned beans and sweet-corn(used them in a chilli con carne) and cut the top and the bottom of the tin  with an opener. They were a bit deeper as needed, but from £2  I created 5 food rings in 5 minutes....

Greasing the tins
My dear friend surprised me on my birthday with this. First glance it looks like and industrial car spray, but actually it is the best gift ever. Greasing the tins is time consuming, specially with the tiny tartlet cases...But with this spray it only takes seconds.

Vanilla: I only use vanilla pod instead of essences and extracts. If you think it is expensive you are wrong....go on Ebay. Usually I buy them in 100s

 (I use them in almost every recipe), but it works out, one pod approx 20-60p instead of the supermarket price of: 1 pod for £2.30-3.99...total rip off if you ask me.

As you only use the vanilla seeds, you will have lots of empty vanilla pods. I have a solution for that as well: we put them into demerara or any other granulated sugar, and after a while you will have vanilla sugar!

We use this sugar for coffee, cakes anything, but it is free and you don't have to buy it in the shops.

Curd cheese or Quark (I buy them in polish shop, write it down and ask  for: Twarog Tlusty-or just look for the pictures on the packaging like me:)): well this is my magic ingredient. We Hungarians use it as a salty main dish (cook the pasta, add the quark with some salt, sprinkle on top some fried bacon and top it with soured cream...........hmm delicious if you ask me) or in  desserts. I prefer to use quark to butter cream because you can achieve the same consistency with half or less calories and you have calcium. Not to mention it is quite cheap 0.5kg is about £3.

You can also buy it in ASDA or Tesco if you live in the UK. Generally the green packaging is the half fat and the red packaging is the full fat version.

Piping bags

I can't empathise how useful Ebay is for bakers. I was struggling to make "piped" bakes as I only had one proper piping bag and to wash it and refill for the next colour was time consuming. I had to look hard to find a good deal but in the end I found a fantastic deal. I ordered 1000 disposable piping bag for about  £ 10. Obviously it a massive amount, but just a perfect gift for my baking friends for Christmas:)

Pudding Powder or Budyn in polish. So for my Fanta cake I had a new ingredient...well new to UK. We Hungarian kids grow up on this dessert, as it is cheap and quick. Just add milk cook it for 5minutes and the result is happy satisfied kids. Not to mention all the flavours you can have it. I would compare to a thick jelly-custardy thing. For the Fanta cake I needed the natural cream of custard flavouring, as I want the Fanta taste to come out. So you need the Budyn Smietakowy.

These are the two most common brands you can have. They cost about £1-1.50