To ask for your baking/cooking shortcuts?

[Pettyspaghetti]

Posting for traffic.
I’m started baking again and really enjoying it, and I’ve read through a lot of MN threads about favourites meals and people sharing/not sharing recipes.
Was wondering what shortcuts you use when baking? Or just full on “cheating”
I melt toffees and pretend it’s a homemade toffee sauce. And I’ve also used the betty crocker chocolate fudge frosting in a homemade cake more than once
I suppose both of mine are definitely in the cheating territory, but what do you do that’s makes baking/cooking easier?

Can someone please enlighten me as to the weighing eggs trick, then using the same weight for.... is it flour, sugar and butter? Or multiples of that weight? Is this for a sponge?

Presumably I would weight the eggs with the shells on...?

• weigh the eggs...

Same weight as eggs.

Oh, and for chocolate cake, replace one third of the flour with cocoa powder.

Yes, it's the same weight of eggs in shells and butter, sugar and flour. I always wonder when someone claims they have a special secret Victoria sponge recipe, because it's kind of a standard fixed thing.

In old money, eggs weigh about 2 oz each, so it's 2 eggs, 4 oz flour, 4 oz butter and 4 oz sugar. Obviously you can conver to metric and scale up for big/small eggs or big/small cakes, but the basic ratio is as fixed.

Spreadingcudweed, you weren’t asking me, but no, the butter doesn’t go in a smaller bowl. You put the cubes of butter directly into the water. When you drain them or scoop them out, softened,they come out dry because they’re grease. The water doesn’t stick. It’s like magic!

Wow JammieCodger that's amazing!! Thanks for explaining!!

In old money, eggs weigh about 2 oz each, so it's 2 eggs, 4 oz flour, 4 oz butter and 4 oz sugar. So when you're using different sized eggs, using the eggs as weights is more accurate, and presumably gives a better result, than just using 2 eggs regardless and 40z of everything else.

If you're cooking something in the oven and want to serve rice with it, you can cook the rice in the oven too - put the rice in a dish, cover it to twice its depth with water, and just leave it in the oven for an hour or so while you get on with doing something enjoyable.

A sachet of toffee flavoured Options hot chicolate powder in buttercream makes amazing icing. I’ve also made it with the chocolate one and it was gorge.

“If you grease and flour your baking tins you don’t need to line them with paper.”

I used to do that before baking parchment was invented, but baking parchment still gives a better result IMO.

TheSeasonOfTheWitch I made some fairy cakes today. I weighed 2 eggs (in their shells). The weight came to 134gm. I then weighed 134gm of SR flour, 134gm of sugar and 134gm of Stork into a bowl, added the eggs, about ½ tsp baking powder and some vanilla extract and mixed it all together until just mixed. I did add a tbs of milk as well. This made 12 delicious fairy cakes.

Amazing, thank you so much, I'm rather excited to try it

Also does anyone use reusable bamboo liners? You cut to your tin then they can just be popped in the dishwasher and used again. Very economical both financially and environmentally, would highly recommend.