How do you keep strawberries fresh in glass?
How to Store Strawberries – When stored properly in the refrigerator using one of the below methods, strawberries should stay fresh for up to one week. Always examine your berries for mold and other signs of spoilage before eating them.
Place in air-tight glassware: Transfer unwashed strawberries into a glass food storage container or mason jar and make sure it’s sealed tight. Paper towel method: Place a clean, dry paper towel in a container and put unwashed strawberries on top. Close the lid and place the container in the refrigerator. Rinse with vinegar solution: Soak strawberries in a vinegar solution (one-part white vinegar and three parts water) for a few minutes. Then drain them, pat them dry, and place them on a clean paper towel in a glass container. Loosely place the lid on and store in the refrigerator.
Ania Lamboiu / 500px
How do you keep cake layers from sliding?
Here’s a super-simple tip to keep your cake stabilized—plus it helps make cutting the cake easier. Making a layer cake? Insert a straw into the center, then trim it. The layers won’t slip around when you frost, and the straw gives you a point in the center to slice to.
How do you keep cake filling from sinking?
How to Stop Fruit From Sinking to the Bottom of Cake – All you have to do is give all your goodies (raisins, cherries, blueberries, currants, etc) a light coating of flour before adding them into your dough or batters. It’s just that easy! The reason behind it is that this will give the dough or batter something to adhere to which holds these lovely bits in place in the bake. 
Did you like this baking tip? I have lots more short videos just like this one that will help you get baking confidently in the kitchen. Get more Bold Baking Basics, 
Hi Bold Bakers! I’m Gemma Stafford, a professional chef originally from Ireland, a cookbook author, and the creator of Bigger Bolder Baking, I want to help you bake with confidence anytime, anywhere with my trusted and tested recipes and baking tips.
Why does fresh fruit sink in a cake?
Sinking Fruit 
07 Jan 2022 – BakeClub Team Have you ever had fresh or dried fruit sink to the bottom of a cake or loaf? Don’t worry, it’s a common problem and generally happens when the cake batter isn’t heavy or thick enough to hold the weight of the fruit as it bakes.
The best way to avoid sinking fruit is to toss the fruit in a couple of tablespoons of the flour (just use some from the measured amount for the recipe) to coat it lightly. Once added to the cake mixture the flour coating will thicken the batter immediately surrounding the fruit and help suspend the fruit.
Keep in mind though, large pieces of fruit like whole raisins will be far too heavy even if coated with flour and you will need to cut these into smaller portions to have success. This will be the same with large chunks of chocolate and are also best cut into smaller pieces.
Why does my fruit cake sink in the middle after baking?
Why Did My Cake Sink In the Middle? (And How to Fix It) Tali Aiona / EyeEm/Getty Images It happens to novices and experts alike: you follow the recipe, or maybe stray just the tiniest bit. Everything is going as planned — until it’s not. That perfect cake sinks in the center, maybe while it’s still in the oven, maybe as it cools.
- What happened? Here’s a primer on the most common reasons cakes (and here we’re mostly addressing cakes or quick breads made with chemical leavening like baking powder or baking soda) develop dreaded sinkholes, and the easiest ways to avoid them.
- Good recipes specify pan size for good reasons: so the cake can support itself and so the interior and exterior cook perfectly in the same amount of time.
The difference between 8- and 9-inch pans may seem insignificant, but it’s about a 25% difference in volume. If a cake pan is too small, the batter may be too deep. It will rise and maybe dome, but if the center is still wet, it will collapse before the structure sets in the center.
(It may also spill over the sides of the pan and onto the oven floor, or both!) You can, of course, hold back some of the batter if your pans are too small — a good rule of thumb is to fill a cake pan about two thirds of the way full. You can also adjust oven temperature and baking times to accommodate pan size but that’s a) math, and b) for another article, from pastry chef Hedy Goldsmith.
The shape of the pan matters, too. Many Bundt cakes and moist, sweet coffee cakes baked in tube pans have high ratios of sugar or liquid that can weaken the structure of the cake. It’s the center tube that allows them to rise and set, and the same batter baked in a round or square cake pan may collapse.
An oven that runs either too cold or too hot increases the risk of a sunken middle. To help understand what happens when your oven is too cold, here’s an oversimplified, one-sentence baking primer: creaming butter and sugar creates thousands of little air bubbles that expand when the gasses created by chemical leavening (baking powder and/or soda) hit the heat of the oven.
If your oven is too cold, those air bubbles expand slloooowwwwlly, get too big, collide, and form large cells before the structure sets. The big loose structure won’t be able to support the weight of the batter and will collapse. And when the cake sets, it will have a coarse crumb due to those large holes.
- If your oven is too hot-well, we’re having a little debate here.
- Conventional wisdom is that excessive heat causes a peaked, cracked “volcano” center as the leavening explodes quicky and the cake sets in a peak (like muffins, which are usually baked at a higher temperature to create a peak).
- And that’s a thing.
But cake that peaks early (like a high school athlete) can then collapse on itself (like a high-school athlete) if batter is still too wet — essentially the same result that you get from a too-cool oven. Use an oven thermometer to assure accuracy. Periodically take your oven’s temperature so you know that it is attaining and holding the correct temperature.
In our kitchens, we also use a thermometer every time we turn on the oven.) Ovens cycle about 25 degrees F in either direction to maintain a steady temperature, so place the thermometer in the center of the oven, heat to 350, and take four readings 20 minutes apart. Then divide by 4 — if you are close to 350, the oven is heating as it should.
If not, you can either try again, with the oven set higher or lower as warranted, check the owners’ manual to see if you can adjust something yourself or get it recalibrated. Additionally, calibrating with two thermometers in different places lets you locate the oven’s hot and cool spots.
One of the most common causes of sinkholes is excess leavening. That may seem counter-intuitive since leavening equals lift. But remember our tiny baking lesson? Say you creamed your butter and sugar properly to create lots of air bubbles. If there is too much leavening, the bubbles keep expanding until they bump into each other, hit the top of your cake, pop and phhhttttt out goes the gas, down goes the cake.
In general: Use 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder or 1/4 teaspoon baking soda per cup of flour. In general is the key: If you’ve made a cake that strays from that base and it works, it’s because someone calibrated the amount of leavening needed in sync with liquid, fat, sugar, mixing method, pan size and shape and baking time.
The more you bake, the more you’ll understand the relationship of all the variables. Robert Rowe / EyeEm/Getty Images Most recipes warn about the dangers of overmixing and developing glutens, which make a cake tough once flour is added to the wet ingredients. But if you go to the other extreme and undermix, you may not develop enough gluten to give the cake structure, and it won’t be able to support itself as it bakes.
Good recipes include visual cues and other tips — how long to mix and the proper look and texture of the batter once it’s properly mixed — to protect you from overmixing and undermixing. Over-aerating — that is, incorporating too much air into the batter — can also weaken the cake’s structure.
Remember our primer? For the most part, the air bubbles created by creaming and expanded by leavening are all you need. If you beat in more air when you add eggs and dry ingredients, you can create large bubbles that weaken the cake’s structure and cause it to collapse. We like to beat the eggs separately and then dribble them into the batter while beating; again, good recipes will give you cues and times to help prevent incorporating too much air.
Underbaking is one of the most frequent reasons that cakes and quick breads collapse. Baking times are essential guides, but ovens and cake pans vary, so checking for doneness with a cake tester is the ultimate insurance against underbaking. Good recipes tell you what signifies “doneness,” e.g., a clean skewer or one with moist crumbs attached.
Our kitchen team has plenty of opinions on what constitutes a proper cake tester. Some prefer a paring knife, to catch a wider portion of cake without creating a hole in the top. Some insist a wooden skewer is best, hole be damned, because the texture of wood grabs underdone batter that can slide off metal, particularly in a very buttery batter.
Others opt for skinny metal cake testers. Use whichever tester works best for you, but be sure to push it all the way down to the bottom of the cake pan where there might be wet batter (especially if you are baking a very deep cake, like a Bundt or loaf).
- Most ovens heat unevenly, with hot and cold spots.
- To compensate, many recipes call for rotating pans halfway through the suggested baking time.
- But if the center of the cake is still liquid, it may sink when you move the pans.
- Try to wait until you are about 3/4 of the way through the suggested baking time to open the door and move pans around.
And to state the obvious: Keep the light in your oven working and the window in the door clean so you can see how liquid or set your cake is without opening the door. Finally, don’t slam the oven door shut — even if a cake is sturdy enough to manage a move, it may still collapse.
Should strawberries be cold or room temperature before dipping in chocolate?
How do you prevent condensation occurring on the chocolate and in between the chocolate and the berry? – It is very hard because strawberries are made of 90% water. Do not dip when they are very cold, try to use room temperature strawberries. For an even better result, do not put them in the refrigerator but in a cold place.