Featured cooks offer some tips for the kitchen

A couple of tips from Sandra Jones were to use Watkins’ brand vanilla when making sour cream pound cake, and when making caramel icing to “lock the door and turn off the phone!”

Jerald Lofton says the secret to no-stick baking is Baker’s Joy spray, and two of his baked specialties are sausage muffins and vanilla wafer cake.

Jerald Lofton

Jonna Cain shared this hint–add a tablespoon of mayonnaise to cake mix and cornbread.

Cathrine Griffin offered two tips when baking cakes, saying whenever possible to substitute applesauce or two overripe bananas for the oil for less fat and better taste, and she uses self-rising flour, omitting the salt and baking soda.

Beverly Threadgill shared a tip that came from a recipe of her daughter, Adrienne. In talking with Adrienne, it was discovered that the information actually came from her dad, John. On a whim, he suggested that she add one or two tablespoons of butter to her chocolate when making her White Chocolate

Raspberry Cheesecake. She admitted that it did made the chocolate melt a lot smoother.

Many of our cooks now include the internet in their recipes searches, and Cheryl Perrault is a fan of allrecipes.com in which you enter ingredients you have on hand, and suggested recipes are given using those. Liz Burt prefers www.justapinch.com.

Hope Ellison Anderson, formerly of Bruce has a family blog  – kevinandhope.blogspot.com – she finds new recipes they’ve enjoyed, she posts them on there.