free will baking: olive oil ricotta cake
let's have fun and be creative ♡
hi hi hello!
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Welcome to a new little series we’re calling: free will baking. A series I’m starting essentially in response to some of the comments I got on this video. Which, I honestly didn’t think reminding people that they have free will and they can use it in the kitchen would cause such an upset, but uhhhhh here we are!!
Here’s the thing, yeah baking is 100% a science. You do need to follow ratios and percentages to get things to work, but there is still ample wiggle room to make things how you want to eat them. It’s something I’ve talked about in previous posts about the recipe development process. You can push the bounds of these percentages pretty far before they break.
But, you don’t even have to touch the science of it all to make what you want. Like I said, not everything on the internet is going to come with a recipe and that’s OKAY. Mostly, because there are literally millions of recipes on the internet and you can piece components together to recreate things you’ve seen or had. You don’t need my brioche donut recipes, you just need a brioche donut recipe. You don’t need to use my brioche donut recipe if you already have a tried and true favorite. If I say, I made my vanilla pastry cream recipe but subbed granulated for brown sugar- you can take my VPC recipe and sub in brown sugar or use brown sugar in your favorite VPC recipe. You see what I’m getting at?
But, most of you have been here long enough to know that. It’s literally the basis of a lot of what I do here (right, see this post on riffing your favorite recipes). It was kinda the whole point of bake club too (rip). And like, I don’t have to explain myself really, those of you who get it, got it. Those who didn’t, I dunno, enjoy being mad for no reason?
Regardless of which route you want to go, piecing together components or fully taking charge and making changes to the base of a recipe, there’s really only two things you need. First, solid base recipe to riff on. This is gonna give you a baseline to refer back to. Like I say, you should make a recipe once as written before you fully go off the depend making swaps and changes. Second, a basic understanding of ingredients and what they do to a recipe. I’m not asking you to know the chemical structure of a sugar crystal. But, you should know what sugar does to a cake or a cookie or ice cream. Which you can learn from books, the internet, or trial and error. Because, if you took your base recipe and cut the sugar in half and it came out dry or crumbly, you’d know exactly who the culprit was. Knowing your ingredients helps to make informed swaps on a whim with the confidence things will still turn out A-OK.
Some books I *highly* recommend that cover the sciencey side of ingredients are:
Sift by Nicola Lamb
How Baking Works by Paula Figoni
Baking Science by Dikla Levy Frances
Also, Start Here by Sohla El-Waylly, not ingredient forward, but really taps into the riff of it all.