Anyone who knows me will be well aware that I do rather enjoy baking tasty treats…not least because I then get to enjoy eating them.  Over the years I have found that it is not always essential to stick to the recipe, which is good news if you aren’t always organised enough to check the ingredients list before going shopping.

These are my top 5 easy substitutes for lazy bakers like me 🙂

1. You can make your own self raising flour.  Shocking I know.  225g of plain flour to 3tsp of baking powder gives you perfect self raising flour. I must admit to never buying self raising flour anymore as this works so well

2. You can replace butter or margarine with sunflower oil.  If you’re doing some dairy free baking or if you’ve just run out of butter, sunflower oil works just as well. 80g sunflower oil replaces 100g butter.  Note here though, you can’t use any old oil.  Rapeseed and olive oil both flavour the baking so best to stick with a vegetable oil if you can.  Also, this only works for cakes.  For pastry the oil just doesn’t cut it.

3. Yoghurt is a perfectly adequate replacement for buttermilk.  I never buy buttermilk and used to be dismayed when a recipe I wanted to try asked for it.  I hate to buy an ingredient for only one recipe because what do I do with the rest of it? Anyway, turns out yoghurt works just as well and is something we typically have in the house all the time. And so far, all types of yoghurt I’ve tried have worked. Cow’s milk, goat’s milk and, best of all for those dairy free recipes, coconut milk all work fine

4. You can replace milk in any recipe with a dollop of nut butter and water.  This has evolved from my discovery that nut milks work just fine in baking to replace cow’s milk.  And nut milk is only nuts and water right?  So, hey presto, whisk up some nut butter and water and you have ready made dairy free milk.  So handy!

5. Last but not least, sugar is sugar is sugar.  Ok so obviously there are differences between caster versus demerara versus coconut sugar but really, when you are baking something, if you are short of sugar then any will do and a mix is just fine.  In a pinch I’ve even used honey but that doesn’t work quite as well.

I hope you find these useful and I’d love to hear any other lazy baking tips if you have them :).  Thank you for reading.