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📖 5 min read September 26, 2026

Basic Baking Ingredients and Terms

The types of flour, sugar, and chocolate, plus baking terms like filling the pan and whipping

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#baking #guide

Even with the same cookie or cake recipe, switching the type of flour or sugar changes the flavor and texture. Here’s a rundown of the ingredients that come up often in this site’s baking recipes, along with the terms that appear again and again.

Ingredients

Flour

Flour is classified by gluten content into bread flour (13% or more, for breads like sandwich loaves and baguettes), all-purpose flour (10–13%, for pound cakes, pie crusts, and the like), and cake flour (under 10%, for pastries like cookies, tart shells, and génoise). Since this site’s baking recipes lean toward pastries and desserts, they mostly use cake flour and all-purpose flour. Whole wheat flour, which is rich in fiber and has a coarse, nutty flavor, is mixed in only in small amounts when you want extra flavor.

Butter

Good-quality real butter is best; processed fats like margarine or shortening lack flavor and aren’t recommended. Baking usually calls for unsalted butter, and if you use salted butter instead, cut back on the salt in the recipe. If you like a tangy, cultured flavor, you can choose cultured butter.

Eggs

Egg whites add volume to a batter, while yolks make it tender. Depending on the recipe, you might use whole eggs or only the whites or yolks.

Sugars

  • White sugar: Colorless, odorless refined sugar. It’s the most widely used and has a clean sweetness.
  • Light brown sugar: Made by heating white sugar, it has a subtle aroma, but because of its color it’s rarely used in things that need to come out white.
  • Dark brown sugar: Light brown sugar with molasses added, giving it a strong caramel aroma. It’s used in certain desserts that need a caramel flavor.
  • Muscovado (light): A sugar that goes through almost no refining, with the richest caramel flavor and plenty of minerals.
  • Powdered sugar: White sugar ground into a fine powder. It’s sometimes used in place of regular sugar in crisp cookies or macarons, and with a little starch mixed in it’s also used to decorate cakes.
  • Honey: Its flavor is strong, so it’s added only in small amounts; it adds sweetness and keeps the finished product moist.

Beyond sweetness, sugar holds on to moisture to keep the finished product moist, and it caramelizes during baking to give an appetizing golden-brown color.

Chocolate

Chocolate types are defined by their cocoa butter and cocoa mass content. Using good-quality chocolate rather than cheap products gives a more flavorful result.

  • Couverture chocolate: A high-end chocolate with at least 30% cocoa butter, melted in the microwave or over a double boiler before use.
  • Dark chocolate: At least 50% cocoa mass, with a relatively strong bitterness.
  • Milk chocolate: 10–25% cocoa mass, with milk added, making it smooth and sweet.
  • White chocolate: 20–30% cocoa butter; the sweetest of the four.

Dairy

Dairy heavy cream made from milk is richer and smoother than non-dairy whipping cream made with additives like palm oil. Use unsweetened dairy heavy cream as the default, and add sugar to adjust the sweetness only when whipping it for frosting, as needed. Sour cream is cream fermented with lactic acid bacteria and has a tangy flavor; adding a little to a cheesecake or pound cake brings out moistness and acidity. Cream cheese is tangy, salty, and rich, with a high water content, and is used mainly for cheesecakes. Milk is used to adjust the consistency of a batter, or mixed with egg yolk and brushed over tart shells or scone dough to give a golden-brown color.

Almond flour

Finely ground almonds. Adding a little to pound cake or muffin batter improves the flavor and makes the texture even more tender.

Baking terms

  • Filling the pan (panning): Filling a mold with the finished batter or dough, or laying it out on a baking sheet. The amount and baking time can change with the size of the pan, so it’s worth checking beforehand.
  • Preheating the oven: Bringing the oven up to temperature before the dough or batter goes in. Since every oven’s actual temperature varies, it’s safer to preheat a little higher than the baking temperature written in the recipe.
  • Mixing: Combining ingredients evenly using a hand mixer, spatula, hand whisk, or similar.
  • Whipping: Adding sugar to cream to increase its volume, or adding sugar to egg whites to make a stiff foam (meringue).
  • Incorporating air: Working air into a batter to increase its volume; especially important when making an egg-white meringue.
  • Meringue: A stiff foam of egg whites whipped with sugar. Cold egg whites aren’t actually required; room-temperature whites give an even more elastic, stable texture. French meringue, where the sugar is added a little at a time, is the most common, and for buttercream a Swiss meringue, where the whites and sugar are heated over a double boiler before whipping, is sometimes used. Meringue loses volume as it sits, so use it right after making it.
  • Resting: Sealing dough in plastic wrap or a plastic bag and refrigerating it so it settles.

Checklist before you start

  • Oven temperatures vary from oven to oven, so treat the recipe’s temperature and time as a guide and adjust while checking how things are actually baking.
  • Measure every ingredient precisely on a kitchen scale, and double-check beforehand that you won’t miss anything partway through.
  • Sift the dry ingredients ahead of time, though coarse flours like almond flour or coconut flour don’t need sifting.
  • Have the bowls, spatulas, mixer, and other tools you need ready and dry, so you don’t lose time in the middle of making the dough.
  • Check the temperature of your ingredients. Take out anything that should be at room temperature ahead of time, and refrigerate anything that should be used cold after measuring it.
  • On this site, “a pinch” means about 0.5g.