The one-bowl baking method
In my experience, whether or not you like baking boils down to one simple question: are you the one doing dishes? When I was young and naive, my saint of a grandma (rest in peace) would putter around sighing and wiping and cleaning as I amassed an ever-growing pile of dirty measuring cups, battered bowls upon bowls, clumpy whisks, and greasy baking sheets. Grandma, if you’ve somehow learned to read English in heaven: I’m so sorry.
Ray is stoked because he doesn’t have to do dishes tonight.
Not everyone has someone at home who loves them that much, and so it’s for you that I present this super simple, scientifically tested technique for one-bowl baking. Even if you don’t live in a van, you might never go back.
Some folks prefer to know why we do things first before doing things. If that sounds like you, carry on. If you’d rather dive in, go ahead and skip to the bottom.
Baking science 101
In theory, all baked goods aim to balance a mixture of structuring ingredients, weakening ingredients, and leavening ingredients.
Typical structuring ingredients include egg protein, dairy protein, gluten, and starch.
Typical weakening ingredients include fat, sugar, liquid, acid, and fiber.
Typical leavening ingredients include baking powder, baking soda, whipped egg whites, and yeast.
The combination determines both how long to mix the batter and the order to add ingredients.
How long should I mix this?
You may have noticed that banana bread and pancake recipes always warn against overmixing. That’s because mixing flour in the presence of water creates too much gluten structure, aka chewiness, which is generally undesirable for desserts.
There is a big exception to this, however, when you bake a more decadent dessert like cake, which is full of weakeners. If you allow fat molecules to coat flour proteins prior to adding liquid, the fat molecules will interfere with gluten development. In addition, mixing allows sugar to dissolve more completely into the batter, weakening protein and starch strands. So if you’re making a fat- and sugar-rich cake, you’ll want to shoot for longer mix times between 2-5 minutes. The Cake Blog has a fantastic write-up of how to achieve different cake textures.
Order matters
Generally speaking, there are two types of baking recipes to look out for: creaming and all-in-one. Creaming recipes starts with whipping sugar with a solid fat. This method is typically used for traditional cakes because it produces a fine, tender crumb, but can be rough on your forearms without an electric mixer. The other method, all-in-one, calls for mixing all the liquids and separately mixing all the dry ingredients, then combining them. The result will be slightly denser which is not always a bad thing.
The one-bowl baking method
You can turn both creaming and all-in-one recipes into an easy one-bowl, hand-mixed recipe by using this sequence:
Liquids first. If starting with a creaming recipe, start with butter as your fat and melt the butter on the skillet. In a bowl, beat together the warm butter, sugar, eggs, liquids, spices, and salt. If starting with an all-in-one recipe, beat together the oil, eggs, sugar, liquids, spices, and salt. Mix up to 5 minutes if a tender texture is desired. Mix 20 seconds if a denser texture is desired.
Flour and leaveners together. Add flour and leavening agents to the bowl and don’t mix until both have been added.
Heavy mix-ins last. Gently fold in goodies like chocolate, raisins, and nuts.
As long as the fat is present in the liquid mixture before adding flour, I find that the result is a perfectly balanced crumb. And there you have it. At most, you will have dirtied one bowl, a fork or a whisk, and a rubber spatula. Your dishwasher thanks you.
