butter tips

every time i see butter written down in a recipe i hear my husband obnoxiously [love you] saying it in his best julia childs voice from the julie & julia movie [don't ask why he's seen that one either...] but seriously, one of the worst things is to get all inspired to make a great recipe only to find out that it calls for softened butter after you are 3/4 of the way through your recipe or beyond the point of turning back. you pop butter in the microwave, you end up with the valley in the center of somewhat melted butter and the rest so soft that it creates a hot & greasy mess as you open it. or almost even worse than that, you say screw it who the heck cares if its softened my kitchen aid mixer can cream it regardless ending up with large chunks and a burnt out mixer.

creaming butter & sugar together [as many recipes of baked goods require] should be the longest step of the entire recipe if you do it the way we are all actually supposed to. melted butter effects the consistency of the batter and the creaming process is essentially shot at that point. It really is recommended that if you melt the butter, that you put it in a small bowl and back in the fridge for your next baked potato or grilled cheese sandwich and start with a fresh stick. i will admit i've made a batch of muffins or two that ended up with grainy looking "creamed" butter and sugar versus the beautiful, slightly yellow lofted goodness a great recipe has.

in the ideal world we would all have the butter softened perfectly out of the wrapper and ready to go the moment we are ready to get baking. what i have found is that the days that i pull butter out, i don't end up baking...the days butter is frozen solid, its a matter of life or death for me to have a fresh sour cream pound cake...the solution?

all you need is a sandwich size ziploc bag. put your butter in there, and run some hot water over it for about 60 seconds, rotating the butter and the bag so that you don't end up with a hole where the stream of water poured onto the bag. within a minute of using not so scalding hot water, i've been able to soften my butter (from refrigerated temperatures) and creaming it with the sugar within minutes!

what's with the cupcake liners?

so recently i used for the first time ever foil cupcake liners...i was mesmerized by the fact that when we were recently given a treat in them how little they actually stuck to the liner. i was in love and ready to try them out for myself. so i have my reynold's cup cake foil liners and begin putting them in the trays...but something was weird.  in between each foil liner was a regular liner. what was i supposed to do with them?! how complicated had i just made this?!

i googled and found a great discussion board where i was surely educated. no you don't have to use both cupcake liners & actually you technically get double the liners if you like to use the regular paper liners too. you can also however, use both if you like the look of the foil liner and the feel of the paper liner. one other fun fact about the foil liners is you don't require a cup cake pan. the foil liners actually hold up the raw cake batter for you! 


good luck to all you bakers! 

camera best practice

so i just recently thought (wishfully) that i was in need of a new, fabulous camera upgrade from my 2 year old canon powershot sd940 when i got a "communication error" every time i plugged in my camera to the macbook pro. well i got to googling only to find out that it wasn't the camera, the cord, or the card...it was me! 


apparently a good best practice is to delete your photos from your camera every so often so that you can free up space for your camera to "think." that being said, you better be backing up your computer in case your hard drive crashes and you are without your photos! however  if you can't get your photos on to your computer, i guess that doesn't help either! so in my googling my new camera using advice would be two things...keep your card under control and buy an external hard drive or back up to the cloud!