Cake Baking Supplies: Ingredients
Cake baking is experiencing a resurgence at the moment. Whether you want to make traditional Victoria sponge cakes, chocolate brownies, vanilla cupcakes, cookies, gingerbread or muffins, cake baking is something fun for all the family to get involved in. This page explains the basic cake making supplies you will need for perfect home baking.
Essential Cake Making Ingredients
Flour
Quality plain or self raising flour are essential cake baking supplies. Inferior quality flour can cause cakes to collapse. Some sweet recipes, such as hot cross buns do require the use of strong flour.
Marriage’s finest self raising flours are ideal for sponge cake recipes helping to ensure the cake will rise with a light airy consistency. Self raising flour is also used in scones, gingerbread, carrot cake and cup cakes.
Marriage’s finest plain flours are ideal for making the pastry bases of tarts, pies, crumble toppings and biscuits.
Marriage’s Organic Light Brown Plain and Organic Light Brown Self Raising flours can be used for a delicious twist on regular recipes. Use them to make pancakes, crumble toppings, steamed puddings, nutritious fruit muffins and Christmas cake.
Click here for more information on our quality flour.
Eggs
Eggs are used to bind cakes. Some recipes require egg whites and yolks to be separated. Rather than discarding the unused part, you can keep it in the fridge for use in another recipe. Ideally use organic or free-range eggs. Ensure that you remove eggs from the fridge in advance of baking, so that they are at room temperature to avoid curdling.
Sugar
Most cake recipes use caster sugar, for example when creaming together butter and sugar in sponge mixtures.
Other varieties of sugar that are used in some cake baking include brown muscovado sugar and icing sugar, which is used to create glace or butter icing.
Butter
Used in cakes, pastries, sweets and icing, butter is used to give a good flavour and crisp texture. Check whether the recipe calls for salted or unsalted butter.
Baking powder
Some recipes require the addition of baking powder alongside plain flour or sometimes self raising flour to increase volume and lighten the texture of cakes.
Other Store cupboard essentials
It is helpful to have a range of other ingredients in your store cupboard or pantry.
Dried fruit and nuts
A selection of dried fruits such as raisins, sultanas, currants and mixed peel, as well as nuts such as walnuts and almonds are useful items to keep in stock.
Food colourings and flavourings
Vanilla and Almond food flavourings are often required in cake making. Food colourings are often used to create multi-coloured icing used to decorate buns and sponge cakes.
Jams and preserves
Jams, honey and lemon curd are useful baking items for making fillings and toppings.
Cocoa powder and instant coffee
These items are useful for adding to cake mixes and icing.
Decorative sundries
Let your imagination run wild! Hundreds and thousands, ‘pick and mix’ sweets, silver balls, glace cherries and chocolate buttons can all be used to decorate cakes. Marzipan is also useful to keep in the store cupboard for Christmas cakes and special occasion cakes.
For bigger cakes, you can collect ribbons, trinkets and candles as decorations.
Many of the larger supermarkets have cake-decorating aisles, however if you want to be more adventurous there are many online cake ingredient specialists worth exploring.
