Up Your Home Baking Skills for Social Media

How to Become a Baking Pro Thanks to Digital

Recreate Chef Recipes

Some artisan chefs have been forced to shut down their shops and businesses because of the pandemic. As such, they have been spending their time putting their own original recipes online. Facebook, TikTok and Instagram step-by-step recipe videos are becoming increasingly popular and so are free online baking tutorials. It's so easy to pause a video, rewind and go according to your desired pace.

Take Part in a Bakealong

A cookalong essentially helps you fine tune those chopping skills, understand measurement techniques better and learn the language of colour and aesthetics to know what is Bleu, Saignant, À point, Bien cuit and Très bien cuit.

Massimo Bottura, an Italian Michelin-starred chef, live-streamed dinner preparation from his kitchen every night at 7pm. Many would tune in to just to understand the real works of what goes into a luscious dinner prep. And while TV shows such as Cupcake Wars, Cake Boss, and The Great British Bake Off are not always on air, baking enthusiasts can also rely on bakealongs peppered all over social media accounts.

TIP: For professional results, why not use the same equipment you'd find in a commercial kitchen? There are lots of affordable options that will raise your game in no time. The equipment in this Bake Like a Pro collection will help you create masterpieces that any chef would be proud of.

How to Become a Social Media Baking Star

Host Your Own Online Baking Classes

The best place to learn is on the job. This is why hosting your own online baking class through a live stream or a pre-recording may work wonders on upping your baking game. Bakers on Instagram master baking classics such as pies, cupcakes and macarons daily, so what can you do that is different from the rest?

One in every three cooking enthusiasts get their recipes from social media, according to Mintel. The same report concluded that digital inspiration for recipes was as essential as recommendations from friends.

So, the recipes you choose to show to the world matter. Baking at home stems from the freely-indulgent spirit. Imagine being able to make your grandmother's much-protected ancestral recipes, to relish and contemplate moments of your childhood. Now imagine sharing those little moments with your audience on social media!

In doing so, you will naturally ignite your passion and practice your baking skills. Make your online cake decorating classes personal.

Create Your Own Niche Diet Recipes

When creating your recipes, think niche. How many health-conscious, weight-watchers and gym-goers are craving for healthy baking ideas? When people are forced to stay at home, they become significantly less active, with the worry of increased weight. This means they naturally gravitate towards make-at-home food options that are specifically aimed at their diet of choice. According to Innova, 25% of new product launches in Asia have a vegetarian stamp. This helps address a specific form of diet.

As such, one way to become an expert at your craft is to push yourself to specialise in one particular form of diet and gather more enthusiasts like yourself to build a supportive community around. Vegan bakeries, gluten-free bakeries, sugar-free bakeries, the options are varied.

Start a 'Know Your Bakeware' Series

Baked goods are one thing, bakeware is another. There is currently a whole content stream around ingredients, diets and food, however we often ignore that poor quality baking trays or the wrong bakeware may also spoil a well executed recipe.

Ever find your cakes not flick smoothly out of your tin despite all the buttering? Cookies that are not consistently coloured? Not everyone masters every bakeware. Some work best with non-stick, others not. So not only does the quality of bakeware matter, but also whether you can handle a particular material as a baker.

You can research simple tricks like the fact that a dark pan cooks the edges too quickly whereas a light coloured, heavyweight pan allows the edges to cook evenly and slowly and later share it with your community. You learn for yourself and share!

Baking Fails to Baking Nails

In a millennial and Gen-Z driven world, it's the order of the day to acquire more skills in less time than usual. In the same Innova report mentioned above, 51% of new product launches in North America have an "easy to prepare" claim. Kitchen stories are often nightmares for many. Most are not worried about a baking fail as much as they are about a fire.

Here are some baking tips and tricks to make you go from baking fails to baking nails.

How Do I Know When My Oven is Preheated?

You may think that the chime going off means that your oven preheating is done. Not true! The chime rings to indicate that air inside the oven is at a certain pre-set temperature. Opening the oven at this point and putting your cookie dough in is a big faux-pas as it actually drops the temperature further down. Worst, you would have just prompted the oven to blast its heat up to come back to the preset temperature. In the meantime, it's the poor cookies that get burnt!

How to Measure Your Ingredients Correctly?

To start off, believe in measuring as a practice. More people than you would think do not actually measure their ingredients. Instead they 'guesstimate' their measurements of herbs and spices, vanilla sticks, splashes of syrup, sprinkles of salt.

The best results happen by measure - not through estimates! Baking is more science than art because it requires exact proportions of ingredients dictated by the laws of chemistry, after all. Keeping your kitchen scales close by, as well as a complete set of measuring jugs and measuring spoons, is essential.

Get into the habit of measuring liquids at eye level of the measuring line. Also, do not skim-read recipe instructions. Read them thoroughly. This will help you gather all required ingredients before starting the preparation. We all think relying on a mental checklist helps - it doesn't.

How Not to Overwork Your Batter or Dough?

The foundation of baking is a perfect cake batter and a perfect dough. The last thing you want is to get the basics wrong. A batter should neither be under or overworked. It should raise naturally to its instinctive saturation point.

Do not abuse the yeast incorporated in the dough. Yeast is an agent, not an ingredient.

The result of overworking a dough or batter also comes from stirring or whisking too much. You should identify the correct consistency at which to stop for each recipe. Or else, you can say hi to tough, dry, dense and flat cakes and muffins are dense and flat!

Ask your favourite chefs on the 'Gram, these three How-Tos for acing your baking skills are the most important. They can make or break the fine line separating a moist and fluffy texture and a chewy and hard one.

How to Safely Share Baked Goods During Social Distancing

With all your 'bakexperimentation', don't let your baked goods go to waste. And even if we are living in unprecedented times, we can always share our food safely. Prepping, packing, and delivering the cookies, cakes, breads, and pies does not have to be a hassle amidst all the social distancing protocols. Sharing baked goods is a neighbourly ritual and can be your own little testimony of faith in your baking skills.

Keep your cooling rack sanitised once all the baked goods are out of the oven. Make sure to handle everything with gloves and use prongs, and baking tweezers to directly pack the cakes into paper bags.

As many self-isolate to prevent the spread of Covid-19, people turn to making comfort desserts as a common activity to engage with their near and dear ones.

Whether it is to pass time, kill boredom or keep children entertained at home, the second activity Australians were most likely to spend more time on was baking or doing art and craft according to a report published by titled Families in Australia Survey: Life during Covid-19.