11 Baking Tips Ina Garten Swears By

No matter how experienced a baker you are, it is always helpful and fun to get tips from a celebrity cook. Ina Garten is certainly one cook we are more than happy to learn from, as her down-to-earth manner helps you feel that you are capable of mastering even the more complex baked goods. This confidence can go a long way to ensuring success.

Garten has baked more than a few delicious treats in her career, meaning she has plenty of tips to share on how to make cakes that will seriously impress. From making sure your ingredients are at the right temperature to getting an accurate oven temperature measurement, her tips can keep you calm and help you enjoy your baking journey. Garten is always telling us that cooking should be fun, and with her helpful tips, it can be. Grab your apron and let's dive into the baking tips that Ina Garten swears by.

If you decide to make an impromptu batch of cookies, it pays to take a little time to get your ingredients to the optimum temperature, rather than just jumping in straight away. Many baking ingredients mix together better if they are at room temperature. If you've ever tried to spread butter straight from the fridge, you will understand that cold ingredients and room temperature ones are very different things to work with.

As well as being easier to mix together, baking ingredients at room temperature traps more air in the mixture, which leads to lighter, fluffier cakes. Garten actually recommends that you keep certain ingredients out of the fridge at all times, including citrus fruits and eggs. Depending on where in the world you live, room temperature eggs may seem like a sensible move, or a health and safety disaster. In the U.K., for example, eggs are sold at room temperature in the grocery store, as all British chickens are vaccinated against salmonella. In the U.S., however, this is not the case — most eggs are washed to remove bacteria from the shell, removing the protective coating from the outside. For this reason, most eggs in the U.S. should be kept in the fridge the majority of the time, and brought out to warm up a couple of hours before baking.

Next time you have a sudden urge to go on a baking frenzy, get your ingredients out of the fridge, then entertain yourself for an hour or so — maybe watch some "Barefoot Contessa" — before returning to make treats that have the best flavor and texture possible.

When you are looking for an ingredient to give an extra boost to your chocolate baked goods, coffee may not be the first thing that springs to mind. However, Ina Garten is a big fan of combining the two, adding coffee to many of her chocolate cakes.

In a YouTube video featuring her chocolate brownies recipe, she says, "Chocolate is really enhanced by the flavor of coffee." Even if you are not a big fan of coffee, you can still use this tip, as the taste will be masked by the chocolate. True chocolate — as in raw cacao — has a bitter taste, so the bitter notes of the coffee work well to enhance the chocolate flavor and balance the sweetness of the dessert. As well as using coffee in the mixture for cakes and brownies, you can add a little to icing and ganache before adding to the top of cookies or drizzling over flapjacks. 

If you thought that this tip would require you to brew espresso before every chocolate baking venture, you needn't worry. Garten points out that instant coffee will do the job just fine, so no need to get the espresso machine out of hiding just yet. You don't even need to brew the coffee — simply add a few spoonfuls of instant granules straight into the mix to take your baking to a rich new level. 

Is there any greater disaster in the baking world than pressing your beautifully cooked muffins out of the tin, only to have them stick and leave deliciousness behind? If the thought of this makes you want to cry, Ina Garten has the perfect tip for you.

While you may already be used to greasing the bottom of the muffin pan to prevent sticking, Garten recommends greasing the top, too. As you know, the muffin mix will often rise up and spill onto the top of the tin, creating the perfect muffin top. However, if you haven't greased the top of the tin as well, precious pieces of muffin will be left behind, ruining your presentation in the process. Garten's easy tip means that the muffins should easily peel away from the tray in one piece.

In the same Instagram video, Garten also recommends using an ice cream scoop to transfer your muffin batter into the tray. This way, they will all be a uniform size, meaning they will look beautiful on a plate, too. It also ensures that they cook evenly, avoiding the situation of the larger muffins being slightly under-cooked.

Unlike a lot of celebrity cooks, Ina Garten is not really one for fancy ingredients. It is likely you will look at a recipe of hers and understand what the items are, and she is a big believer in using what you already have at home to cook. However, if you can buy high-quality versions of certain ingredients when possible, the quality of your baked goods will increase.

One thing that Garten likes to splurge on when baking is the chocolate, and she has a favorite brand that she relies on — Lindt. She even did a blind taste test with seven other brands, and still declared Lindt as the winner, commenting that it has the perfect balance of flavor. If you opt for low-quality chocolate in your baked goods, it will show in the final dish, and the flavor will suffer as a result. To paraphrase a famous quote about wine, if the chocolate isn't good enough to eat, don't cook with it!

Another tip Garten has for high-quality ingredients is to buy local, seasonal produce when possible. If you need fruit for your baking, buying from your local market will guarantee you produce that is vibrant and full of flavor. You will also be supporting your local community at the same time.

When it comes to cupcakes, none are quite as strikingly beautiful as the red velvet variety. Ina Garten also has these crimson treats on her list of favorites, and she has a secret ingredient that she says makes all the difference — buttermilk.

Confusingly, modern buttermilk has nothing at all to do with butter. It was originally the by-product of the process of butter making, which is where it gets its name. It is made by adding bacteria to milk to make it ferment. It has a tangy flavor, and according to Garten, it's the key to keeping red velvet cupcakes moist.

Another huge benefit of using buttermilk in your cupcakes is the chemistry of it reacting with baking soda. The acid in the buttermilk will react with the alkaline baking soda, in a neutralization reaction that produces carbon dioxide. These bubbles of carbon dioxide are crucial for creating light and fluffy muffins, as well as other baked goods such as pancakes. If you want to create red velvet cupcakes that are up to the standard of the Barefoot Contessa herself, don't skip the buttermilk, and you will be rewarded with muffins that are moist, light, and airy.

Have you ever found yourself excitedly half-way through your baking adventure, only to open the pantry and realize you don't have one of your ingredients? This leads to the difficult decision of whether to dash to the store, or just abandon it and try again another day. Ina Garten doesn't want you to be in that position, so she recommends preparing all of your ingredients before you begin to avoid this frustration.

Though it may take a few extra minutes at the start of the cooking, preparing your 'mise en place' — which means 'putting in place' — will allow you to see if you have everything your recipe needs in the right quantities. It involves measuring out all of your dry ingredients into little bowls, whisking your eggs, and chopping up any nuts to ensure you are fully prepped before you begin.

Another advantage of preparing in advance is that the rest of the cook becomes much easier and less stressful. With everything in front of you, fully prepped, it is just a matter of lifting each bowl at a time and adding it to your mixture. This will allow you to fully enjoy your baking experience without feeling rushed or under pressure. It is especially useful if you are baking for other people, such as before a dinner party, so you can enjoy your time in the kitchen and then go and greet your guests.

One of the things we all love about Ina Garten is how down to earth she appears to be. As a home cook, it is especially encouraging to hear her repeatedly say that "store-bought is fine." This doesn't mean that she is discouraging making food from scratch, but you don't have to make every ingredient fresh all the time.

One perfect example of an ingredient where a store-bought version can save you plenty of heartache is puff pastry. Making it from scratch can be a bit of a mission — it takes a long time to keep adding butter, folding, and chilling, and a good quality store-bought can taste nearly as good.

The key when using any store bought ingredient is to buy the best one you can afford. In the case of puff pastry, the higher the butter content, the better. Garten even encourages buying frozen puff pastry, meaning you will always have a pack of it on hand whenever you need it. Whether it's to make palmier, as Garten loves to do, or a savory pie, you can focus on getting the rest of the ingredients spot on and leave the complex pastry preparation behind.

As a home cook, it is easy to assume that an oven thermometer is a gadget that is only used by professional chefs, but this is not the case. This small, inexpensive tool could be just the gadget you need to take your baking to new heights. If you want to take your baking seriously, you need to know the exact temperature of your oven — Ina Garten points out that "no matter what it says on the dial, the oven itself could be totally different." In the same way that you would never put your cookies into the oven before it had preheated, putting them in without a thermometer can leave you with a false sense of security. A fluctuation of 10 degrees can be the difference between beautiful cookies and ones that are burnt or under-cooked. 

Baking, as opposed to other types of cooking, needs precision temperatures and timing — there is less wiggle room for things to go wrong. An oven thermometer will tell you the exact temperature inside the oven the entire time, meaning you can breathe easy, knowing your pastries are being perfectly cooked.

Vanilla extract is a staple that most of us have in our pantries, but Ina Garten encourages you to give the imitation version a miss and use real vanilla instead. Most of the cheap vanilla extract in grocery stores has no actual vanilla in it uses a synthetic compound called vanillin for flavor.

To purchase high quality vanilla extract, you must look for one that says "pure vanilla" on the bottle. This means you will be flavoring your pastries with the pungent, sweet flavor from vanilla beans, rather than a poor imitation. Though it is often more expensive, your taste buds will thank you for it.

If you want to go one step further, why not take a leaf out of the Barefoot Contessa's book and make your own vanilla extract from scratch? It may take a while — at least six months of infusing before it will be ready — but once it is made, you can use it in your baking for many years to come. In this Instagram video, Garten explains that she has had the same jar for 40 years, and simply tops it up every so often.

Baking at home can be rewarding, but it is also very time consuming. In our fast-paced society, many of us struggle to find the time to make baked goods with the little amount of time we have. Fortunately, Ina Garten has a great hack that will allow you to make a batch of cupcakes without putting you under too much time pressure.

The Barefoot Contessa advises making your cupcakes the day before you need them, storing them in the fridge without any icing, and simply icing them just before you are ready to serve. You will need to wrap them up well to make sure they maintain their texture for a day or two in the fridge. Then, let them come to room temperature on the day of before you add the icing.

If you want to prepare even further ahead, you can freeze the un-iced cupcakes in advance, but they will need an hour or more to defrost before you apply the icing. You can use the time as it defrosts to make your icing and think about how you want to present them. This simple tip from Garten means you can have picture perfect cupcakes without the stress — and a kitchen full of mess — on the day that you are having company.

You can always trust Ina Garten to take an ingredient that we use regularly and put a different spin on it, and she does this with raisins. If you have a bag of the dried fruit in your pantry to be used in your cakes and sweet treats, Garten advises switching from your regular raisins for golden ones instead.

Golden raisins are processed differently from the regular ones, giving them a sweeter flavor that will lend a different note to your cakes than you are used to. Their extra sweetness may even mean that you can reduce the added sugar in the cake, making it healthier overall. Their plump texture and sweet flavor make them an ideal addition to carrot cake, cookies, and scones, and their bright color will add a splash of sunshine to your treats.