Oven thermostats

Happy Monday morning to you all!

This coming weekend we have sweet spiced roasted pecans and Swedish visiting cakes available for ordering.  The following weekend you can order French butter cookies and spritz cookies.

It's great weather for baking right now.  What do I mean by that?  Well, with the weather cool or chilly, it's great to be standing there in the kitchen on a cold morning and feeling the heat of the oven every time I open it to place or remove a tray of cookies or rolls or whatever else I might happen to be baking.  The warm air that rises at that moment makes me think of sitting in front of a fireplace or next to a wood-burning stove.  It is a wonderful thing.  The heat is intense and all-enveloping.  

I keep an oven thermometer hanging from the cooking racks in my oven.  I do that because you never know when your oven thermostat might be out of calibration.  Additionally, when you preheat your oven and the light comes on that says it's ready, it might not actually be ready.  The spot in the oven where the thermostat is found might be the right temperature, but that doesn't meant the entre oven is that same temperature.  And my oven thermometer shows that.  So I always wait a few more minutes before placing the baking sheet inside to ensure that the the entire oven is ready for baking.  I wait until my thermometer shows me that the temperature is correct and that it is stable.

Many recipes will say to turn a tray of cookies or rolls when baking so that everything gets baked with an even heat.  If baking a tray that is sitting closer to the oven door than to the back, some (depending on their oven) will see a difference in color after the baked tray is pulled from the oven.  The food along the side of the tray at the back is darker than those items just a couple inches away which are near the door.  Every time that door is opened, the area by the door decreases in temperature as the heat escapes and rapidly rises.  And this can affect the baking significantly.

I am fortunate that my oven heats quite quickly and maintains a temperature exceedingly well.  But not every oven does that.  I was at a friends house once and was baking something fresh for them, and I brought along my oven thermometer.  The thermometer showed a marked difference from what the oven thermostat said.  And then when the door was opened, the time it took the oven to heat back up to replace the lost heat was considerable.  This kind of thing details how important it is to know your own oven and to be mindful of checking temperatures if you want to have consistency in everything that is baked.

Today I'm making chicken quesadillas.  And this week I'm planning on a dark chocolate tart as well.  And I'm tweaking the final presentation of a new chocolate snack cake which will soon be on the menu.

That's all for now.  Have a great Monday!