Tip No: 5

I am always aware of the temperature of my butter, eggs, melted chocolate, and any liquids. Temperature matters, and one ingredient at the wrong temperature can foil a recipe. For example, if you’re making a flaky pie pastry or scone, the ingredients must be as cold as possible. If they are warm, the fat will combine too thoroughly with the dry ingredients when you mix them together, and you will end up with a cookie-like dough, rather than a flaky one. You want the fat to stay firm and cold and not blend completely into the dry ingredients, so that it melts in the heat of the oven, steams up, and makes the dough puff up. Beating together butter and sugar for a cake batter is another example. You want the sugar crystals to carve out numerous microscopic air pockets in the butter, so that when the batter is in the oven, the pockets will expand, ensuring a light cake. If the butter is too warm, the pockets created by the sugar will collapse and your cake will be dense. A third example is when you add a liquid, such as eggs, to creamed butter and sugar. If the liquid is a lot colder than the creamed mixture, it won’t blend in well, and you’ll end up with lots of tunnels and tough spots in your cake because the liquid mixed directly with the dry ingredients, rather than with the butter and sugar. Cake and cookie batters are all about the thorough emulsification of ingredients, and if you have ingredients that aren’t around the same temperature, they can’t emulsify. There are many more examples, such as when you mix melted chocolate or butter into other ingredients, but the bottom line is simple: Pay attention to the temperature of the ingredients specified in each recipe.