Baking skill - Kids' Kitchen
Learning to bake will unlock a world of delicious recipes including cakes, bread and biscuits. Explore BBC Good Food's Kids' Kitchen videos, recipes and advice for more essential skills.
BBC Good Food’s series of Kids' Kitchen videos, recipes and advice will help you and your children learn essential skills for cooking, teaching you and them how to use these skills to create a variety of delicious dishes from scratch.
Learning to bake
Lots of kids love to bake. Let’s face it, the rewards can be great! Making food you love to eat as a family, including cakes and other sweet treats from time to time, is all part of learning to love food and cooking, and feeling confident in the kitchen. Once your kids have mastered how to use an oven safely and correctly, crusty loaves, pizzas, pies and cakes are all just a recipe away. They can also move on to roasted meat and veggies, which we’ll cover when we move on to roasting next.
Recipes that use the baking skill
Steps to success
- To bake, you can use a fan (usually indicated by a picture of a fan on the oven controls) or convection setting (usually indicated by a picture of two horizontal lines) and an electric or gas oven – our recipes give the correct temperatures for all these settings and oven types.
- When baking, heat the oven at the beginning of the recipe to give it time to heat up to the correct temperature.
- Most foods should be baked on an oven rack in the centre of the oven unless the recipe states otherwise. Check your oven rack is positioned correctly with enough space above for the tin to fit before you turn the oven on.
Kitchen kit
Oven gloves – these are essential for protecting your hands when handling hot tins and trays. Look for thick gloves that fully cover your hands and, ideally, part of your wrists and arms. Use oven gloves when placing anything in or taking anything out of a hot oven.
Baking trays – thin baking trays can warp and bend in a hot oven. Look for a nice sturdy tray but make sure it’s not too heavy for you to lift in and out of the oven.
Cake tins – you’ll need a variety of shapes and sizes, our most-used tins are a round 20cm cake tin with a loose bottom (or two of these if you want to make sandwich cakes), a square or rectangular brownie tin, a 900g loaf tin and a muffin tray.
Reusable cake tin liners – these make lining your tins a piece of cake, and you can buy round and rectangular liners in cookware shops or online.
Weighing scales – baking is a science, the ingredients react to each other when heat is applied, which creates air bubbles that cause cakes and bread to rise – get the measurements wrong and your bake could be ruined.
Cooling rack – these allow baked foods to cool quickly by letting the air circulate around them. They can also prevent the steam causing a soggy base.
How to line a cake tin
- Lining a cake tin is a little bit like doing origami – it can be a little tricky at first but you’ll soon get the hang of it. We line cake tins to prevent cakes from sticking to them.
- First, brush your cake tin with a little oil or softened butter, this will help the baking parchment to stick.
- For a round tin, place the tin or the base from the tin on the baking parchment and draw around it, then cut it out. To line the sides, use the offcuts from cutting out your base. Fold the strips of parchment at the bottom and snip on a diagonal to get a fanned effect that will sit neatly in the tin.
- For a loaf tin, use your pencil to mark out a strip that's longer than your tin, so the parchment acts as handles when getting the cake out. You can also line the sides if you want to be extra careful – cut out two strips and fold down the corners.
Recipes that use the baking skill
We’d love to see what you’ve been cooking. Send your pictures to us at goodfoodwebsite@immediate.co.uk or tag us online with #gfkidskitchen. Visit the Kids' Kitchen hub to learn even more skills.
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