Kitchen and Cooking Tips

These kitchen and cooking tips can really come in handy when you're using Grandma's old fashioned dessert recipes. The historical recipes are shown exactly as first published, and sometimes you might need a wee bit of help. Practical tips were often passed down from one generation of cooks in a family to the next, and now they are passed on for you to use.

Help with Old Fashioned Recipes

The vintage recipes sometimes contain outdated measurement terms like gill, salt-spoon, grain, and wineglass, making the quantities called for unclear. And because most old fashioned wood stoves of Grandma's day didn't have temperature gauges, only a few of the baking recipes provide accurate oven temperatures and cooking times.

So, I've gathered a collection of helpful hints to address the shortcomings of the old recipes along with some practical cooking methods to make your kitchen and baking chores easier. They'll also help to ensure that your homemade desserts will turn out just like Grandma's.

Grandma's Kitchen and Cooking Tips

How to Get Nutritional Information

Old fashioned dessert recipes rarely contained nutritional info, but you can easily visit the HappyForks website to get a free nutritional analysis and downloadable Nutrition Label for your recipe.

Just copy and paste your ingredient list into the online Recipe Analyzer and select the approximate number of servings. However...

Whenever the old fashioned dessert recipes are written in paragraph form, you will need to estimate the servings needed and rewrite the ingredients as a list.

For example:

2 cups cake flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, and 2 tablespoons butter becomes...

2 cups cake flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons butter

Simply follow the editing instructions for any ingredients and measurements not recognized. It's easy to do. For instance, you might need to indicate the type of eggs needed.

Once you've entered all the ingredients and the number of servings, you'll see the calorie count for each ingredient.

Finally, view and download a Nutrition Facts Label should you wish to save the results. For instance, below is the analysis of the Zesty Orange Cupcake Recipe that's found on the Homemade Cupcake Recipes page.

Egg Safety Tip

Some No Bake recipes might call for raw, uncooked eggs or egg whites. To avoid any health risk, please visit my Eggs and Salmonella page for simple instructions on how to safely adapt the old fashioned recipe.

About Grandma's Kitchen and Cooking Tips

You will love using this collection of practical kitchen and cooking tips including standard cooking measures, historical baking measurements, and wood stove oven temperature conversions for modern day baking.

There's also helpful information on ingredient substitutions and even step-by-step instructions for opening a coconut the easy way.

Some of the old tips and hints are definitely from a bygone era, yet they are fun to read, and you never know when you might find a practical use for them.

Believe me, there really is something for everyone here and more tips are being added as I find them, so be sure to bookmark this page and return to it often.