Mary Berry’s baking tips for absolute beginners

Scared of your scones? Think your pastries are petrifying? Does your cake look clumsy? Mary Berry and BBC Food readers have tips to make impressive bakes completely manageable

In this episode of BBC One's Dame Mary Berry’s Fantastic Feasts, Mary throws a surprise afternoon tea party in Cardiff for Soraya, an unsung hero and youth worker. Along with celebrity kitchen elves Roman Kemp and Tom Read Wilson, Mary will help Soraya's friends put together a really special menu.

There’s just one problem, Soraya's friends haven't the first idea how to cook. And Roman’s never even had a sip of tea before! But if anyone can teach them how to turn out a top tart and a stellar scone, it's Mary. She shares her top tips for absolute beginners, alongside the baking secrets of our audience of passionate foodies.

Sometimes you just have to jump in

For an afternoon tea with a difference, instead of sandwiches, there’s red pepper, cheese and chive tartlets, a four-tier clementine cake and of course, Mary's classic scones served with strawberry jam and clotted cream.

Not the beginners' menu we expected! “There is absolutely no doubt that they are very, very novice cooks,” says Mary. She chuckles over their greatest culinary achievement: "a sandwich with banana sprinkled with sugar!” But they are motivated: “They're all really good mates and they desperately want to prove that they can cook for Soraya to say a huge thank you,” explains Mary.

“When we started cooking in the kitchen and I was showing them what to do, they encouraged each other, they made notes. But when they got away back into their own kitchen cooking, I think they thought well you know, ‘Where's Mary? I need someone to hold my hand!’ and they hadn't got anybody!” We all feel like that sometimes, Mary.

Lesson number one: sometimes you just have to give things a go, even if it’s intimidating. And remember, there’s nothing wrong with making a mistake – trial and error is an effective way to learn.

Mary believes that anyone, regardless of their prior cooking experience, can create an impressive tea. Lesson number two, she says, to be prepared and be precise.

“I know it sounds a bit obvious, but when making scones weighing the ingredients correctly is important. You need good weighing scales so that ingredients are weighed precisely - it does help with baking to have digital scales because they are accurate.”

It's the same with cake tins: “Time and time again when baking cakes, people choose the wrong size tin - make sure you use the right tin for the portion of cake mix - get the tape measure out and measure it!”

We've all been there. Desperate to make a particular cake, but staring wistfully at the wrong tin. It'll work, right? Sometimes. Use the BBC Food cake calculator to create a recipe for the tin size you have, with the flavours and icing you like. It will even calculate cupcakes and fairy cakes.

Lesson three: give yourself more time than you think you need. Recipe writers like readers to feel that it will take the minimum time required, but they are very experienced and assume a fairly confident pace. They also don't often write in how long things need to cool, either.

When Thear makes the show-stopping clementine cake, he's not thrown by the baking. It's the cutting each layer evenly: “It's really difficult to cut a cake as soon as it's come out of the oven and is cooled; it's so beautifully fresh but it's a definite skill to cut it in half,” says Mary.

Cakes can be made in advance and frozen, well-wrapped up. They are a lot easier to handle – whether you are slicing them to make more layers or whether you are just covering them in buttercream icing. It also splits your baking job across multiple days, so it isn't so tiring or intimidating.

Pamper your pastry

In the show we see firefighter Mark take on the savoury tarts. Tackling a life-threatening blaze is nothing next to pastry. Shrinking, greasy, uneven, leaking pastry is the stuff of nightmares. Buying ready-made pastry is one solution, but to make a tartlet worthy of Dame Mary, it has to be homemade.

A food processor or blender makes homemade pastry the work of a few seconds. Mary's tip is to roll the pastry out immediately after it's been made. Rolling it out at this stage is easier as the butter is softer. Once the tins are lined, resting the pastry is an important step. It stops the pastry case from shrinking up in the tin as it bakes. Chilling the butter back down ensures that you don't get greasy pastry. Lesson four: don't cut corners in the recipe, and give yourself a rest too.

Using a fairy cake tin, or bun tin, makes elegant little tartlets. But don't be tempted to fill them to the top: “if you overfill them, the custard goes down underneath them, and you won't get them out of the tins without breakage,” says Mary. “Mark took great care and actually, his were very good,” says Mary.

Everyone can use help

Working with a buddy can help you sense check a recipe as you go along, and help you remember to add all the ingredients. It also adds a sense of occasion and, dare we say it, fun? Lesson five: even Mary Berry gets help!

“My husband has a special birthday in March and we're actually having a family lunch to celebrate. I'm doing one course, Annabel our daughter is doing the main course and our daughter-in-law is doing another course. I think if you've got a special occasion to cook for, it's lovely to share it. Just do a section of it each between family or friends and it's a lovely present isn’t it?”

Your tips

It’s not just Mary who’s got great advice, our BBC Food community does too. On Facebook and Twitter, we asked our passionate foodies for their best baking tips and they didn’t disappoint. Here are some of our favourites:

Originally published March 2022