Doubling Recipes...

[ALTAF]

Hello,

I'm wondering can i double cakes & cookies recipes easily? or do they need certain method?

[K8memphis]

You can usually just do the math and double, triple the recipes and use the same methods and it's fine. It always works for me.

[ALTAF]

You can usually just do the math and double, triple the recipes and use the same methods and it's fine. It always works for me.

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Well i have wrote to some food magazine and pastry chefs before and there reply was confusing!. They told me not all desserts recipes can be doubled or tripled, you have to try and see for your self!! so i was not helpful, and i'm not going to use a huge amount of ingridients then throw it!

[Wendy DeBord]

Maybe it would be helpful if you qouted us the confusing responses you've recieved. Perhaps we can clarify what their points were.

You can indeed double, triple and even multiple like 30 times what the orginial recipe was with-out having any bad effects at all. BUT there are a few items that you can't just keep multiplying with-out making some adjustments.

Your question is too broad. No one can say you can do 'this' for all recipes. You need to be more specific. Which recipes do you want to increase, how big of a batch do you want to make?

Over all, doubling or tripling a recipe has very little if any effect on 99.9% of baked goods.

[ALTAF]

Maybe it would be helpful if you qouted us the confusing responses you've recieved. Perhaps we can clarify what their points were.

You can indeed double, triple and even multiple like 30 times what the orginial recipe was with-out having any bad effects at all. BUT there are a few items that you can't just keep multiplying with-out making some adjustments.

Your question is too broad. No one can say you can do 'this' for all recipes. You need to be more specific. Which recipes do you want to increase, how big of a batch do you want to make?

Over all, doubling or tripling a recipe has very little if any effect on 99.9% of baked goods.

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Hi Wendy,

well the answers that i recieved and confused me are:

1- when you are doubling a recipe, you can double the flour and liquide but everything else you will use 11/2 times the original amount!

2- boubling leaveners such as baking soda & baking powder can br tricky!

.............that what made me confused

[Wendy DeBord]

For the most part, this is what we try to do here at eG.......help people sort thru the confusion and help people learn how to bake. I can tell you from my own experience baking from countless numbers of books..........that not everything I've read is true/correct. Just like reading the newspaper or watching tv, everything isn't always as factual as one might be lead to believe.

For the most part I have seen better information being written over the last couple years then ever were on baking. Partly because peoples knowledge and science has increased. Partly because we have such a global community that now you can talk to someone on the other side of the earth, communication and knowledge have gotten better.

Unforunately, the information you qouted is as outdated/incorrect as me telling you the earth is flat. Theres so many different types of baked goods that you can't group everything into one. Maybe some items do need adjustments as you increase or decrease it's recipe. Some you don't need to adjust ever. There just isn't one answer for every type of baked good.

So when your trying to learn about baked goods, it's most helpful if you ask specific questions about specific items. Not all cookies contain eggs, not all cookies bake best at 350F, all cookies aren't chocolate, all cookies don't contain butter. But if you ask someone about the specific cookie recipe (or cake, whatever) then it leaves little room for experts/people to debate. And thats exactly what we all do here at eG. We talk about specific recipes and what our results were. We discuss and contemplate why this or that happened and how to make adjustments to recipes.

[ALTAF]

I agree with you wendy. Thanks for the information

Edited October 30, 2005 by ALTAF (log)

[bkeith]

I think one of the biggest reasons people are cautious about giving advice on doubling recipes for baked goods is the tradition of volumetric measurements in the US. A cup of flour can contain anywhere from 4 to 6 ounces of flour. That sort of variability can cause big variations in the final product when even a single batch of a recipe is made. When you start multiplying, the margin of error can become quite large. A cake that calls for 2 cups of flour might wind up with anywhere from 8 to 12 ounces of flour. Triple that recipe, and your batter might contain anwhere from 24 to 36 ounces. That's a huge difference.

Once I converted all my recipes to weight-based measurements, I've had no problems at all scaling things up or down to suit my needs. I regularly do an 8x batch of cake batter (because that's the biggest batch I can fit in my mixer), and the cakes come out just like they do from a single batch.

[Beanie]

I agree with bkeith about weighing. I've also scaled recipes by converting to baker's percentage where flour is always 100% and other ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the flour. The total is always more than 100%. Once you do this a few times, it's really easy. I found this link explaining it. I'm sure this has been discussed on eG but I haven't had time to do a search.