![]() If I tell you the biscuits are made with a recipe that is 60 grams of butter, 120 grams of milk, and 180 grams of flour, divide all the quantities by 60 grams, and you end up with a ratio of 1:2:3, by weight.If I tell you the cake is made with 2 cups of butter, 4 cups of sugar, 6 cups of flour: divide all the numbers by 2 cups and you end up with 1 of butter, 2 of sugar, 3 of flour.If I tell you a shortbread recipe is 115 grams of sugar, 230 grams of butter, and 345 grams of flour: divide all the quantities by 115 grams, which leaves you with 1 of sugar, 2 of butter, and 3 of flour.The goal is to bring the components down to the smallest whole numbers they can be: When you want to calculate ratios, you divide all the components by the same number, usually the smallest number of the recipe. Clearly, I'd make a terrible math teacher, so let's move on. the fraction ½ or 0.5, which translates to 50 % of the whole. And each portion represents half of the whole, i.e. Why? Well, if you have two equal parts that are one-to-one, the whole is two parts. Another way to express a one-to-one ratio is 50/50 or as 50 %. I'm trying to recall when did ratios make an appearance when we were in school? A ratio is a fraction, so ratios would have come up in math class: a 1-to-1 ratio can be written as 1:1 and we know that works out to equal parts. The good news is that baking is pretty logical and once you understand the ingredients, the techniques, and the ratios, you can pretty much create anything you want, with a little dose of experimenting to perfect your final product. You're also going to have to get very familiar with the ins and outs of baking substitutions. In order to work with ratios and get creative, you need to understand the roles of the ingredients used in baking and what each ingredient contributes to a recipe. It would be impossible to fix at that point. The orange juice will probably lead to a broken buttercream where you've lost the emulsion and the solid fat is separated from the liquid. ![]() The same goes for frostings: if you like Italian meringue buttercream, and you want to turn the vanilla buttercream into an orange buttercream, you can't just add in orange juice. You have to take away from one ingredient and replace it with the lemon juice, otherwise, you may end up with too much liquid in the batter, resulting in a gummy cake that is impossible to properly bake through. You can't just add lemon juice to the recipe and expect the same results, though lemon-flavoured. In baking, it's very difficult to reinvent the cake recipe because at its core, the amounts of each ingredient relative to each other have to fit a certain mould, otherwise you risk throwing off the recipe.For example, if you have a basic vanilla layer cake recipe that you like and you want to adapt it to make it lemon flavoured. It's also a way to learn how recipe writers deviate from the basics to come up with new recipes. It's a method to dissect a recipe to allow you to understand what makes it tick. ![]() ![]() Whenever I come across a new baking recipe that intrigues me, I always try to work out the ratio to see if this "new to me" recipe fits into a ratio that I am already familiar with. Need more help with baking conversions?.Resources to help you with bake with ratios.Recipes can be very difficult to remember and to memorize, but ratios are generally more memorable and usually work out to a formula that is easy to commit to memory, to use, to scale up or down. If you remember the ratios for the basic baking recipes, you can bake almost anything. ![]()
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